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Stress Control Redux

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In another two and a half hours, I’ve got to traipse over to the Mayo to begin a round of what promises to be increasingly invasive testing. What joy.

My doc and his bouncing young resident think what ails me could be any of a number of things: an H. pylori infection, acid reflux, pancreatitis, impending liver failure. Some of the possibilities make being infected with the first bacterium proven to cause cancer look good. Oh, and by the way, there’s this high blood pressure issue…

Whatever it is, I’ve found it seems to relate directly to stress. The more harassed I feel, the more upset the stomach gets, and vice versa. After spending a day hanging out first with KJG and then with SDXB, essentially doing nothing but relaxing and chatting, I suddenly felt a lot better. Then, a couple of days ago, a stress-filled day that included meeting with doctors who kept me sitting in an examining room twiddling my thumbs for almost an hour left me with a volcano in my gut.

Here’s what Dr. Funny thinks: Since the beginning of the summer, I have been so stressed worrying about money and working endless hours for little or no pay, it’s maxed out my ability to cope.

Making it through the summer without enough cash coming in to cover base expenses was very difficult, indeed. From pinching pennies all spring, I had enough saved from teaching to pay the bills in May, June, July, and August, but only just. By the beginning of summer, the account that held spending money had run dry. Although I was assigned to teach three sections in the fall, arranging them in three eight-week sessions (one the first half of the semester and two in the second half) meant that in late August and September, too little would come in to pay the bills. Social Security and teaching income together were simply not enough to live on.

Then when Social Security pulled the stunt of withholding an entire month’s benefit check for the crime of earning $340 more than allowed, that pushed me to the point of not being able to cope at all. You can tear your hair trying to figure out how to get by only so many hours before you go bald.

Add to that the fact that I spend way, way, way too many hours in front of the computer, most of them pursuing sub-minimum wage pay.

Online courses are obscenely time-consuming. I am sick and tired of fiddling with Blackboard, which is about the most cumbersome bloatware this side of Microsoft. Nay! Blackboard makes Microsoft look thin and lithe. At least MS Office works. Most of the time. If I had ever tried to keep track of the number of hours wasted screwing around with Blackboard, by now I would have lost track. To say nothing of having lost my mind.

Yesterday I worked about three hours on blogging—starting at three in the morning, wrote and fiddled around until about 6:00 a.m. This work earned about $9 an hour. The day before yesterday, the site earned $.02. I wrote two posts that day; neither was very long, but taken together they probably took an hour or more to write, edit, and revise. Yes. That’s a pay rate of, at best, two cents an hour. On average I’ve earned $2.25 an hour at blogging over the past two days.

I blog because I like to blog, not to earn a living. So you could say it’s all very nice to earn a bit of pocket change for what started out as a hobby. Still…I’m spending a lot of time on this for very little return.

Teaching, as spotty as it is, comes closer to providing a reliable income than anything other than Social Security. But by its nature, adjunct pay does not cover the bills. It’s irregular and unpredictable. But the worst part of it is, you spend many, many, many hours on the job for which you are flat not paid.

This summer the college kindly paid me a stipend for preparing an online course in magazine writing. The amount was the equivalent of pay for a three-credit course. That was very nice, but I didn’t get the full amount until after I had jumped through endless hoops, some of which were real time-wasters. With the exception of about two weeks in May, I worked almost full-time on this task through the entire summer. It should take about a week and a half of full-time work to do a semester’s course prep for something you haven’t taught recently. Although I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth—pay for course prep is largely unheard-of in academic circles—the fact is that because of the way the money was paid, it didn’t help me when I most needed it. Despite working very hard on a tedious job all summer long, I ended up with little to help me get through that long dry spell.

Because I sit in front of the computer from three, four, or five in the morning all the way through to eight or nine at night, I never get any exercise. Occasionally I walk the dog. I try to do that twice a day, but as a practical matter I’m doing well to get to it once a day. And during the summer it was way too hot to take her out during the daylight hours. In the mornings I was working–I would start on average around 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and not lift my head until 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., at which point I had to cope with the pool and the yard before it got impossibly hot. By the time that was done and the dog and I were fed, it was impossibly hot. By 10:00 p.m., when I would ordinarily quit working, I often was too tired to drag myself and the hound around the block.

We’re doing a little better now that the weather is cooler. But a stroll around the block does not make it as exercise! I need to get back on the mountain—or, since the city is going to start charging a stiff fee for the privilege of parking outside the public parks, over to a neighborhood at the base of Squaw Peak, where I can walk on hilly streets. The dog will have to stay home, because she can’t keep up with a fast walk of two or three miles.

That’s going to necessitate a major change in habits. Driving across town and spending an hour or 90 minutes charging around, then having to race home and wash the sweat off and fix breakfast will blow away my mornings.

Here are my proposed strategies:

1. Arrange a 3 percent drawdown from savings in an amount that, combined with Social Security, will cover base expenses twelve months a year. That one is already done.

2. Use teaching income solely to cover my share of the mortgage on the downtown house. This allows me to pay for that without having to incur still more taxes by drawing down an extra $9600 a year from my IRAs.

3. Glom onto any leftover teaching income for diddle-it-away change…and use it. Spend some money on concerts, day trips, and yea verily…even recreational shopping.

4. Also with this extra money (assuming there is any), run the air conditioner at a tolerable level next summer. I do not think I can bear the prospect of spending another 115-degree summer cooped up inside a miserably uncomfortable house.

5. Further simplify courses. Make all nonessential exercises ungraded in-class exercises. Reduce the number of papers that have to be read and graded to the three or four required assignments plus their drafts.

6. Quit sitting in front of the computer all day long. In fact, do not even turn it on before about 10:00 a.m.

7. Set MacMail to divert the vast amount of spam that pours in from the community college district by blacklisting offending addresses, thereby reducing the surprising amount of time consumed by deleting the endless irrelevant messages.

8. Find ways to reduce the amount of time spent at blogging, or to write several days’ posts at once.

That’s about it. Not having to worry quite so much about money should help a lot. But to that, I’ve got to add getting some exercise and building a more normal life.

Wee Hours Wandering

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It’s a quarter to two, there’s no one in the house…except Cassie and me. I’ve neglected visiting my blogging friends for so long, I’ve forgotten what they write about. So here’s a chance, in the wee hours, to do a little blog-hopping.

Frugal Scholar has been holding forth on any number of interesting issues. Yesterday she was riding my favorite hobby horse, Ol’ Income Inequality. Giddyap! La Maya glommed onto the same subject the other day, having recently come across the chart that shows how real income in the U.S. rose from about 1830 to 1970 and has been dropping ever since. More recently it seems to have dropped precipitously. While gut instinct tells me that we’re worse off now than we were under Bill Clinton (or hell…even under Ronald Reagan!), one needs to keep in mind that “real income” figures don’t necessarily take all the important metrics under consideration. For example, in 1830 (or even early 1970) workers didn’t routinely have their employers pay most or all of their health care insurance. Factors such as smaller household size, widespread two-earner households, the existence of passive income, and rising real consumption also come into play here.

Still at FS, take time to wonder at the real estate market, where Frugal trots out another of my pet hobbyhorses: foreign investors in distressed U.S. real estate. During the savings & loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same darn thing we’re seeing now happened: as Americans defaulted on loans and lenders sank beneath the waves, Canadians rushed into the Arizona real estate market, turning homes all over established middle-class neighborhoods into rentals. As absentee landlords, they didn’t give one thin damn about who they were renting to or what the renters were doing to the property. Forthwith we saw blight spread through once pleasant and safe central city districts. The minute the economy improved, middle-class homeowners fled to the new suburbs, created as developers bladed the Sonoran desert at the rate of an acre an hour to accommodate people who wanted nothing more than to get quit of their ratty new neighbors and to move into HOAs and gated communities, which they imagined would protect their investments in their homes.

On a lighter note, over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche solicits opinions on this cute little blouse she got at 50 percent off. Even at the mark-down, is it worth keeping? Revanche has discovered the benefits of investing in Vanguard’s Admiral Shares, where expense ratios are extravagantly low.

At Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman tries to cope with the anger she feels at the current vogue for open hatred. This is a long and thoughtful essay, well worth the read.

Over Forty and Loving It isn’t loving having to deal with punch-a-button mazes. Ugh. Just imagine being the poor wretch that you finally do reach, after ten or fifteen minutes of farting around in the phone tree. By the time I reach a person, I’m so furious it’s really hard to keep that angry edge out of my voice. I’ll bet those boiler room phone answering drones get sooooo much abuse from the public. What a way to earn your minimum wage!

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan has come across a strange critter: the conduit municipal bond. I’d never heard of this before. It certainly is an eyebrow-raiser.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability reports that she and Mr. A managed to beat back their credit-card debt by over $5000 in just six months. Awesome! Congratulations, Mrs. A!

Speaking of the good fight against debt and for financial health, J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly has a nice post on how to combat the frugalist doldrums. What do you do when you think you just can’t bear to look at another budget ever again?

Holy mackerel! Did you know kids could become victims of identity theft, too? Over at Free Money Finance, FMF advises on this issue and suggests several ways to protect  your kids.

Five-Cent Nickel is running an employment survey of his readers, asking what’s your job outlook. One of Nickel’s collaborators, Laura Martinez, does a good job of explaining auto title loans and their dangers.

At Brip Blap, Steve engaged the current “What’s in Your Wallet” meme the other day. He wraps up with an intriguing speculation about the future of wallets.

Simple Life in France, being preggers, visited a French dietition and ended up with a very interesting post on la différance between French and American viewpoints on what’s healthy.

And now, mes amies, daylight is breaking and I’m going back to bed.

Guercino, Aurora, Goddess of Dawn. Public domain.

Here’s something worth watching

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Have you seen Evan‘s new website enterprise? He’s experimenting with moving to other kinds of sites than blogging. It’s a baby pool, and it’s a hoot. Prospective parents can set up little minisites where friends and family can guess when and where Baby will be born, Baby’s weight, or Baby’s gender.

Evan’s description of what he had to do to get it up and running is interesting. It was quite a job. No handy-dandy WordPress template is out there for this sort of thing! Despite his considerable tech skills, he ended up having to hire a designer to make it work the way he wanted—at least one wanted as much as $10,000 to do the job! Read his post to learn how he found someone to help for a fee within his budget.

I hope Evan will keep us up to date on how this idea flies. I’ve also thought it might be worth looking in to other kinds of sites that could be monetized, though I’m not clever enough to come up with something like a baby pool. La Maya has started a site to display the paintings she’s willing to sell; she hopes to add new images regularly. It’ll be interesting to know whether the baby pool gets anywhere as an enterprise.

Back to the Future…

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{sigh} We have seen the future, and it is…the Dark Ages. The Party of No has wrested control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Party of the Half-Baked. No hope for relief from the metastasizing mean-mindedness and outright viciousness that have invaded our body politic is to be found, anywhere.

Here in Arizona, voters have approved a measure that exempts citizens and businesses from the national healthcare plan. The comically moronic Governor Jan Brewer (she of “uhhhhhh………..tee hee!……..uhhhhhmmmmmm”) was re-elected, of course, and the craven pol who presided as superintendent of public instruction while Arizona’s school system sank to the bottom of the national rankings is now, God help us, the state attorney general.

Now I’ll have to say, I wasn’t pleased with Obama’s healthcare plan. Without a national option, it’s just another iteration of what we already had: it threw us into the lion’s den with a pride of hungry insurance companies. We needed an option to make something like Medicare available to everyone who wished to accept it. Medicare is expensive — even after the state’s insurers raised their rates, my employee plan cost an eighth of what I’m paying to be fully covered under Medicare. However, for what I’m paying, coverage is better. If I fall ill and have to go doctors frequently, my overall costs will be much lower. Requiring everyone to sign up for full coverage with private insurers while blocking insurers from shafting people who really need care simply guaranteed that everybody’s costs would go up, coverage would be no better than what we have, and the well-heeled insurance industry would be joined by every other well-heeled industry in mounting a no-holds-barred campaign against the Obama administration.

Accepting compromise on healthcare was stupid. If the Democrats couldn’t swing a national healthcare option, then they should have dropped their plan until they could.

As for the Afghanistan mess: We were in Afghanistan long before Obama came along. Matter of fact, it seems to me we entered the war in the Middle East because a certain pack of lies emanated from a previous administration. Afghanistan was where the perp was hiding, but instead of going after him, we took it upon ourselves to depose a dictator who was formerly our ally, not because he was much of a threat but because, said our then-President, “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

So…now we have in office some folks who think it’s acceptable to stomp on the head of a woman who disagrees with their doctrine.

Time to get out our brown shirts and iron them. And if you still believe you’re in the middle class, say good-bye to all that.

Another Day, Another Dollar

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Finished another set of student papers, highly entertaining. This bunch seems to have split sharply between those who got it right on and those who stumbled into a haze of mystification. It’s a function, I’m afraid, of online teaching. If a human being isn’t there, in person, nagging and repeating the nag day in and day out, some folks have a rough time keeping up—especially when the pace is pretty fast, as it is in these eight-week courses.

If I weren’t already in “pause” mode about online pedagogy, this would put me in it. I spent the whole damn summer trying to make this course work for anyone who might sign up. Even after I made them take a quiz on the syllabus, they still apparently haven’t read it, still don’t do the assigned readings, still don’t seem to know due dates.

Another serious issue is that some of them either can’t or won’t buy the book. Their student aid gets to them long after the semester begins, and as a result, they simply don’t have the money for textbooks. Our text is pretty cheap—available today at Amazon.com for around $10 new, less than $5 used. But I still had someone write to ask if they really had to buy the book.

Why do they think I’d require a textbook if I didn’t expect them to read it? And why are they in school if they don’t want to read?

There’s something creepy about how wedded they are to the Internet. They just don’t want to turn it off. Given an assignment that requires some research, they’ll do everything in their power to find enough to suffice online. If a resource doesn’t exist in digital form, they just won’t go to it. They’ll ignore it. Sometimes they’ll ignore it because they don’t know where to find it…and it doesn’t occur to them to look in a library. Or even a bookstore. But sometimes they appear to be convinced that something equivalent or better is to be found on the Web.

It’s kinda sad. As rivers of knowledge go, the Internet is wide and shallow. If it’s true we’re watching the death of the printed word, what’s coming to replace it doesn’t quite seem to be up to the job of preserving a culture and passing it to the next generations.

Well. Despite its barren moments, at least teaching is a living. This morning I figured out that if we can permanently keep the present “modified” terms of the mortgage on the downtown house, I can cover my share by teaching two and two, especially if a miracle happens and I get a tax refund this spring. Three and two will cover it generously, and three and three would give me plenty of money to live more or less comfortably. And to put some cash in savings toward such frolics as buying a new(er) car and being prepared to replaster the pool, when the time comes.

Image:

Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

Calculating the next year’s budgeting

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The future of real estate, 2010

Now, this new scheme to do the 3 percent drawdown from savings so as to stock my checking account with enough cash to cover monthly expenses is not all beer and skittles.

The fly in the beer, alas, is the misbegotten mortgage on the downtown house, which under the influence of the Crash of the Bush Economy (duck! Evan’s got the Nerf Bat! :-D) has morphed from what looked like a wise move into a money-sucking black hole.

To cover my share of the mutual madness M’hijito and I got ourselves into, I’ll have to teach two sections of composition from now until the universe ends. It means that although my bills will be covered by savings and Social Security, almost everything I earn through adjunct teaching will go to pay the mortgage.

It’s annoying, but not dire: two classes don’t amount very much work. Three sections, more work than I’d like to do but not intolerable, would cover the mortgage and leave some pocket change.

Well. That assumes that we can talk the credit union into morphing our present loan modification into a permanent 40-year loan at 4 percent. If we can’t, then I’m screwed. M’hijito is planning to call the bank next week to arrange a meeting so we can negotiate the mortgage’s reset, since the modification expires in February.

This predicament would be a lot less annoying if the house were worth anything like what we paid for it. Though values in the central city dropped slower than those in the far-flung styrofoam-and-stucco suburbs, over the past year they’ve sunk into the sub-basement. We’re now about $100,000 underwater on the little house. Not counting the $35,000 we put into renovating it.

M’hijito says the house two lots down the street just sold for $140,000, and it’s larger and nicer than ours. We paid $235,000.

We’ll have to figure out what to do about that after he finishes graduate school, which will take another five years, assuming he works at it steadily. Coincidentally, about five years is as long as I figure I’ll be able to continue working, assuming my current ailment is something minor and not one of the several gawdawful things it could be.

Which reminds me…gotta get that will updated.

Meanwhile, if I live that long, for the next five years or so life will still be a little pinched—the $2,040/month budget just covers bills, with maybe $50 or $100 to spare for extra costs. But at least I won’t be wondering where even that minimal amount is going to come from. Though still won’t be any vacations, by working somewhat harder than I’d like to work in “retirement,” I can at least buy clothes and have an occasional meal out.

Image:
Zacharie Davies, Shack in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.