It happened three times yesterday: signs of senility. Not one, not two, but three really serious things that stir up my absolute worst, most terrifying fears—financial and otherwise.
First, I learned I failed to pay the Cox bill last month. So convinced was I that I must have paid it that I shot off an inquiry to the credit union asking if there was some way a Billpay transaction could have gone astray. I’d entered the transaction in my Excel spreadsheet and neatly stored the statement in the “Utilities” folder. But apparently that was as far as it went: evidently I never went into Billpay and paid the bill.
Then I lost my progressive glasses. In the classroom. Right in front of me. Right in front of 20 students. I knew they had to be there. But I couldn’t find them.
My vision is getting worse, so that I can’t read a computer screen through the progressives. When I have those on, to read a computer monitor I have to take the glasses off and stick my face up close to the screen. I’d taken them off a couple of times to read students’ work, and I’d taken them off at the instructor’s terminal. When I went to put them back on, they were gone.
Searched all over the desk, the floor, the chair…nothing. Searched the desks where I’d been helping students. Nothing. Pretty quick twenty students were searching the classroom. Finally I found them: inside the large, bulky binder that serves as my mobile office, sandwiched between pages. I’d already looked through the thing twice and missed seeing them.
The problem is, without a pair of glasses on, I can’t see a desk or counter clearly enough to spot a pair of lost glasses. So if I don’t put them down in the same place every single time they go off my face, I have a dickens of a time finding them.
Last night I lost the goddamned glasses again!
They’re somewhere in the house, the car, or the yard. But I can not find them. And this time I do have another pair of glasses on so that I most certainly can see the surfaces around me.
I searched for hours last night. I searched until 12:30 a.m. This morning by light of day, I searched again. They’re fucking GONE.
M’hijito likes to say, patronizingly, that things like this are not “lost”; they’re “misplaced.” Well, as far as I’m concerned, an item so “misplaced” that I can’t find it and so can’t use it when I need it is lost!
He’s going to come over sometime this week and help to toss the house, searching for the damn things. Meanwhile I’ll have to tip over the recycling bin and the kitchen garbage, dump all that stuff on the pavement, and paw through it. Fortunately, I have an old pair of distance vision glasses. But those progressives, besides being wildly expensive, are the best pair of glasses I’ve ever had—the only pair that make it possible for me to sort of see up close and also see in the distance, without tripping over curbs and thresholds when I try to walk around. I certainly can’t afford to replace them…the cost was staggering. So, unless they surface, I’m flat outta luck.
This is what scares me: getting too sick to work and not dying. And alzheimering out comes under the heading of “too sick to work”
What in the name of God am I going to do when I’m so addled I can no longer earn even the pittance I make at adjunct teaching? What am I going to do when I need someone to take care of me? There is no one to watch over me when this sort of thing becomes a daily occurrence.
And what will happen if I have a stroke? A heart attack? Some accident that keeps me from doing the piddly amount of work I’m doing now to keep myself going?
More than bag lady syndrome, it scares me. More than that ungodly upside-down mortgage that’s going to start sucking up my retirement savings when I can’t earn enough to cover my part of the payments, it scares me. Even more than the unholy right-wing extremists who’re trying to take over the country, it scares me!
LOL! And that‘s scared!
We all have our financial terrors, I expect. What specifically they are probably depends on our time of life.
When you’re a young thing, you fear you’ll never earn more than the median wage (if that) in some low-income right-to-work state. When you get established in a career, you worry that something will happen to put you out of a job. Or you run up a ton of debt and imagine a line of bill collectors forming outside the front door. Then you have kids and you wonder how you’re ever going to support them, or what will happen if you die before they reach adulthood. They grow up, they’re out the door, and you realize you’ve only got a few years to go until retirement, the house isn’t paid for, and you don’t have enough in savings to support you through your dotage. Then you reach your dotage, and heaven help you, you start losing your glasses…to say nothing of your marbles.
Is there a PF bogeyman hiding in your closet, waiting to pop out and haunt you at 4 in the morning? What does it look like?
Images:
Homeless man, Tokyo. MichaelMaggs. Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Here Comes the Bogey-Man (Que viene el Coco). Francisco de Goya. This image was uploaded to Wikipedia as a donation by the Brooklyn Museum, and is considered to have no known copyright restrictions by the institutions of the Brooklyn Museum.
So I dropped by thegood Dr. Davis’s office yesterday afternoon, parking illegally in the menacingly signed parking lot of the mall across the street.
He opined that there is no reason to replace the ancient crown in the lower jaw. The chip on it, as he has opined several times in the past, is cosmetic and in no way affects the crown’s functionality.
The newly busted tooth in the upper jaw, however, does need a crown. He says it’s broken down to the dentin and should be fixed before anything else happens to it.
He proposes to charge $1,246 for the crown and a new night guard. That is less than half the $2,695 the other dentist wants to charge for two crowns and no night guard.
At first he couldn’t figure out why the guy wanted to install two crowns. When I said Other Dentist’s preference is for gold crowns, Doc Davis said a gold crown in the upper jaw would do in the porcelain crown in the lower jaw; that would explain the plan to replace the old crown when the new one goes in.
I will say I’ve had better luck, in the comfort department, with gold, and they’re likely to last the rest of my lifetime. However, I’ve already got two gold crowns; two more will make me look like some bizarre character out of a Batman movie.
Given the cost of this adventure, it seems to make sense to go with a porcelain crown on top and use a night guard to protect them both against my gnashing habit. Then take the rest of the tax refund that Other Dentist proposed to consume—$1,750 saved! more than that, actually, because O.D. would have charged another $350 to make a night guard—and turn it into a sinking fund for future restoration work. If I start adding the equivalent of a monthly Delta Dental premium to that stash, by the time one or both of these white crowns need to be replaced (which they certainly will), the money should be there to cover it.
The iMac’s wireless rodent ran out of gas the other day, and I didn’t have any AA batteries laying around the house. Instead of running forthwith down to the corner store to buy new batteries, I made a deliberate decision to leave the computer off.
This is something I need to do every day: leave the computer off. Maybe more of us need to do that.
Don’t know about you, but I spend way, way too much time in front of computer monitors, to the detriment of health, social life, and the general sanitation of my home. So mesmerizing is this thing that whenever I sit down in front of a computer—doesn’t much matter what for—I go into a kind of hypnotic state, losing track of the time and losing track of conscious existence. I don’t hear what’s going on around me and I don’t think about what’s going on around me. That’s how I came to destroy not one but two expensive pieces of cookware (and have on occasion been damned lucky not to set fire to the kitchen). I depend on the Internet for news, encyclopedia information, medical advice, teaching tools, social interaction…and it has expanded to take over my life.
Like the Borg, it has assimilated me.
Between this phenomenon and the fact that the rib injury has hurt so much I could hardly move, by last Friday my house had come to rival a pigsty in its spectacular filth. All 1860 square feet of tile floors felt gritty underfoot. The kitchen floor was getting sticky as well as unsightly. The stovetop was encrusted with grease. The kitchen and bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Outdoors, plants were dying for lack of water, the garden had gone to seed, suckers were growing like green scrub-brush bristles all over the desert willow and the yellow oleander. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s in-line leaf-catcher was so stuffed with debris the system was dying of entropy. And on Thursday a fellow member of our business group, showing off his brand-new iPad, snapped a photo of us all: I was sitting there with my head thrust forward and a dopey look on my face, just as I must look while parked in front of a computer monitor.
This. has. got. to. stop.
Friday’s post was written on Thursday night. So, on Friday when the iMac went incommunicado, instead of rescuing it, I pulled the suckers off the desert willow and then spent the entire day cleaning house. Did the laundry; washed the sheets; changed the bed. So far behind on these chores was I that catching up required an entire day.
That evening I used the MacBook to view current episodes of Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show, during which time I soaked, oiled and manicured my skaggy, neglected toenails and fingernails. Saturday: cleaned and vacuumed the filthy car, cleaned out the garage, read assignments from the online students. Rode my bike around the neighborhood. Sunday: cleaned out the pool equipment, scrubbed down the grease-soaked barbecue, pulled the dead and dying plants out of the garden, started to trim some of the frosted branches off the cape honeysuckle and the bougainvillea, rode my bike into a different neighborhood and along a stretch of canal bank. Ironed four weeks’ worth of jeans and shirts. Watched last week’s episode of PBS’s Masterpiece on the MacBook and this week’s off the air, again manicuring the exhausted fingernails with shea butter.
A weekend away from the computer left me feeling…well, I was left with quite a few thoughts.
• I need to limit the time I spend in front of the computer. • I’ve got to keep up with housework, yardwork, and basic personal grooming. • I need to get a social life. • I need to get more exercise. • I must re-evaluate why I am writing this blog and whether I should continue writing it at all.
While all this was going on, a flurry of anguished e-mails hit the message board of the blogger’s group I belong to. One of our members was undergoing a similar crisis of confidence. She reported that she had run out of ideas for posts, and that…yes! She was simply spending too much time in a trance-like state in front of the computer monitor!
She was expressing exactly what had been going through my own mind.
Why blog at all? Why did I start blogging, and how did FaM morph from an obscure diary to…to whatever the hell it is?
When I was a teenaged girl, I started writing a daily journal. That’s how I became a fairly skilled writer: practice makes perfect. On and off over the past 50 years, I’ve written something almost every day.
Four or five years ago, wearied of constant virus hassles and endless Microsoft patching and updates, I bought a Macintosh. A program called iLife came with the Mac. Among other things, this program makes it possible for users to write blogs and store them in Apple’s cloudlike server space, now dubbed ME.com. When I found this after I bought the iMac, it occurred to me that instead of filling up notebook after notebook, I could write journal entries digitally.
Too, I’d heard of “blogs” and wondered if I could write one. Somehow I’d stumbled across Trent Hamm’s The Simple Dollar, and so (monkey see, monkey do!) I decided to try my hand at a personal finance blog—heavier on the personal than on the finance. It really never occurred to me that anyone would read it. Nor did I especially intend for anyone to read it, any more than I intended for anyone to read my daily journals.
The iLife system is pretty limited. Its blog function apparently was intended for people who want to post photos of the kids for the grandparents to view, and not for serious blogging. This was fine by me, because at the outset it was strictly a hobby. And so I was astonished to discover that somewhere out there, people actually were reading my maunderings.
Belatedly, I moved FaM to WordPress.com. There it remained pretty much an idle hobby, but because of WordPress’s broad functionality, the blog grew in reach and readership. I continued to write every day, only because that’s what I do. But over time I began to craft posts more carefully and to try to focus the blog more specifically on PF how-to’s and advice.
At the urging of new blogging friends, I decided to move FaM to Bluehost so I could monetize it. This occurred with the help of Mrs. Micah, who at the time was running BlogCrafted, the website consultancy she had started. FaM soon started to earn money. Not much, but something.
This development changed the drift of what I was writing, because of course it changed the enterprise’s underlying mission. Instead of writing for the hell of writing—a kind of busman’s holiday—now I was again writing for pay. This meant I had to focus more sharply on personal finance issues and try (at least on occasion) to write for the widest possible readership. And I also had to spend a lot more time on SEO and various efforts to publicize the blog.
Doing anything for money tends to sap the fun out of it. Instead of entertainment, it morphs into a job. Now I was spending one to three hours a day (often more than that) at work: on top of a real paying job and on top of trying to run a side business. True, the blog also served as a podium from which to vent about that paying job and about my blessedly former employer, the Great Desert University. But still, blogging had become a job.
Today FaM has almost 500 subscribers, plus an unknown number who, like me, do not subscribe to blogs but manually revisit a specific set of favorites. It averages about 14,760 unique visits a month. So far this year it’s already had over 1.3 million hits. People all over the planet are reading this thing. As one-man bands go, it seems to be moderately successful.
With this small success has come a steady flow of “offers” from would-be advertisers. Most of them—a good 99.99% of them—are pretty sleazy: payday loan operators and loan consolidators. Many of them do not try to do business with me directly, but instead hire wannabe freelance writers, who seem to be ignorant of the implications of what they’re doing, to offer me FREE! guest posts laced with paid links. Others wish to pay me to write posts similarly laced with said paid links.
Paid text links violate Google’s terms of service. They put a site at risk of losing its page rank, the very quality that makes advertisers wish to place paid links on your site. You can get around this risk by entering code that makes their links “no-follow” links, which, as I understand it, tells search engines to ignore them. This conflicts with the text-link peddler’s motive, and so most of the time when you tell them you’ll publish only no-follow links, they back off.
I’m sure FaM could make a lot of money selling space to these shady operators. Briefly. As soon as Google knocked out my page rank, however, the text-link crowd would move to some other sucker’s site, and FaM’s AdSense income would tank.
Practicalities aside, fake “guest posts” whose sole purpose is to plant advertisements masquerading as helpful links are unethical. They misrepresent themselves and your blog to your readers. Like print advertorials, they pretend to be something they are not.
So, I made a conscious decision not to sell space for paid text links, and never to accept guest posts from people I don’t know or to run do-follow links to any commercial sites. This includes all the Amazon Associate ads that run on FaM: they all have been converted to no-follow links.
I seriously considered demonetizing Funny altogether. Adsense clutters up the site, makes it look junky. And it doesn’t earn much: despite continuing growth in traffic, revenues have dropped from around $200 to about $150 a month. On the other hand, it does supplement revenues from editing, and over the course of a year accrues enough to buy, say, a new iMac. So I’ve decided to leave Adsense in place for the nonce. If our proposed new client materializes this summer and actually pays enough to matter, I’ll revisit that decision.
So. Given that the site never will earn enough to substitute for a day job, I need to decide what to do to bring the endless time consumption under control. Here’s how I think I should start:
• First, quit posting every day. Cut the number of published posts from seven a week to three or four. At the very least, never post on weekends, when readership drops drastically.
• Next, do not write the first thing in the morning. Instead, take the dog for a walk and then launch into normal human activities. Write posts in the evening, after more useful pursuits have been accomplished.
• Mine student papers for guest posts. Each assignment elicits several interesting, well written pieces from the feature writing students. At the end of each semester, assess these and ask the best writers if they would like to publish one or more articles on FaM.
• Stop submitting posts to blog carnivals every single week. This is time-consuming, and, because I enter any damnfool thing instead of limiting submissions to the best pieces, not very productive.
• Quit writing the “Moments of Fame” series. It is time-consuming to plow through three or four carnivals a week looking for the posts that might interest FaM readers and then writing blurbs for each of them. Instead, post a tag in each accepted submission, linking from that post directly back to the carnival that featured it.
• Remove the Alexa toolbar from Firefox and never think about it again.
• Revisit the advertising question later, after this scheme has a chance to create some breathing space. Then consider other ways to monetize FaM…or whether to demonetize it altogether.
Tomorrow—assuming I post tomorrow—Funny’s 1,500th post will go live. If not tomorrow, this certainly will happen sometime in the next few days. It’s a milepost! A good time to rethink.
Are you ready for this one? It’s huge. Over at Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman is celebrating her one-year blogiversary by running amok with the giveaways. Donna, as we all know, is already the giveaway queen. Last week she sent me a copy of Personal Investing: The Missing Manual, a widely admired guide to retirement planning and investing, and she threw in a wacky calendar adorned with Alaskan moose photos—just for doing what comes naturally, posting a comment on one of her articles.
To mark her one-year blogging anniversary, Donna is giving away not one, not two, nay not even three gifts, but twenty-one of them. What can you hope for? Well, she’s offering…
Donna points out that even if you don’t shop at Amazon or B&N, you can sell these cards on the secondary market. Same is true, I expect of any of the other goodies. But who would want to part with them?
Another extravagant giveaway is going on at Stoopid Success: try one or all of the 14 ways to enter the $300 giveaway slated for May 15.
The Outlier Model just moved off WordPress.com, launching a self-hosted site with a classy new design.
Boomer and Echo got an offer on their house and accepted it. They had to agonize a bit, but it looks like this was a smart decision.
Interesting article over at Canadian Finance Blog: Tom explains all those rules of thumb we’re supposed to apply to figuring out how much to save for retirement. Hmmm… Read all the way down through this post and you’ll see how much a typical Canadian can expect to receive from their equivalent of Social Security. Don’t hear any screaming about how their system’s going broke or how it’s time to short the old folks, and this is a far cry from the pittance Yanks receive… D’you suppose their legislators refrained from raiding those funds? Naaahhh….couldn’t be. Could it?
At Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured, NicoleandMaggie get a great string of comments going about breaking our addictions.
Check out these posts from my friends in Money Sisters:
So after class yesterday I made a quick run on the Safeway, figuring to pick up enough to tide me over for a week. Not figuring to damn near faint dead away at the price of groceries!
Paid $60 for about $30 worth of food. Only food: no cleaning goods, no paper goods, no personal products, no wine, no beer, no coffee, no tea, none of that. The checkout guy was actually about to charge me $80, until I produced the Safeway red card, by which Safeway promises to give me a fair price in exchange for the personal disinformation I enter on an application form. We could say, actually, that Safeway charged my deceased German shepherd, whose telephone number (oddly enough) is the same as that of Safeway’s regional headquarters, a mere $60 for $30 worth of food.
Two and a half bucks for a head of romaine. Yea, verily, $2.50 for a head of any kind of leaf lettuce, including the pricey hydroponic stuff! After some cogitation, I realized that a large package of prewashed baby lettuce was cheaper by the ounce than a tough old head of clean-it-and-cut-it-yourself romaine. A dollar sixty-nine for a pound of apples (I got one, count it, (1), Jonagold apple at a bargain price of $1.49.
For Cassie, I found chicken hindquarters at 99 cents/pound, no “EXTREME VALUE!” since they’re full of bones. I’ll use the bones to make stock, of course. But still… Also got a package of “EXTREME VALUE!” boned pork for $1.59 a pound. These were the two cheapest items on the meat counters.
The pork, actually, looks pretty nice: it’s good and lean. Tonight I’ll cook it all up, have some of it for myself, and cut up the rest for Her Dogship. These two packages should last her about ten or twelve days. Assuming I refrain from eating much of it.
What sixty bucks bought was…
1 box of lettuce (large!)
1 bag frozen spinach
1 bag frozen mixed veggies
1 bag frozen bean/veggie/rice mixture
1 pound bacon
1 bunch fresh asparagus, about a pound
1 bunch green onions
1 head cabbage
3 bananas
1 cucumber
1 apple
32 ounces plain yoghurt
4.4 pounds pork
4.9 pounds chicken
1 package baking chocolate
Exclusive of meat for the Queen of the Funny Farm, this stuff is gonna last about a week or ten days, with luck. I have some fish and a couple small pieces of steak in the freezer, a lot of beans on the shelves, and enough cleaning supplies and toilet paper to last six months. If I don’t buy any more bacon this month, I might manage to go as much as two weeks without another grocery-store run. But I seriously doubt it.
My plan for this budget cycle is to wait until about two days before the cycle ends before making the monthly Costco run. Normally, I raid the Costco in the first day or two of the budget cycle. Because I’m about out of food and household supplies by then, I often spend upwards of $250 on this junket. Invariably some unexpected zap occurs shortly after that, making it difficult or impossible to stay on budget for the rest of the month. What I’d like to do this time is scrape along until the end of the month and then head for Costco, knowing at that time how much remains in the budget to spend. Otherwise, don’t go into Costco at all.
The theory, such as it is, proposes that one may be less likely to run out of money at the end of the month if one holds off on large routine shopping trips until the close of the budget cycle.
Now, it remains to be seen how well this theory does when tested by reality. However, I think I can eat out of the freezer and from relatively inexpensive purchases until pretty close to the ending day of this month’s budget cycle, which will be May 20. Today is April 28, a week into the current month, and this is the first grocery purchase I’ve made. Two more supermarket junkets would carry me through to the proposed month-end Costco run.
An end-cycle Costco spree would stock the larder for a good two to three weeks, delaying the need for much grocery shopping until more than halfway through next month. Thus that retiming of the Costco run could set me up to save a little on groceries, because I’d make fewer trips to supermarkets than I’m having to do this month. The problem is, I’ll be very surprised if, in a month when housekeeping supplies run low, it would be possible to stay much under $380 at Costco.
Just now I have $501 left in the cycle that started April 21. Assuming the two projected grocery-store trips also cost around $60 apiece, I spend another $55 or $60 on gasoline, I don’t get my hair done, I don’t go out to eat, and no little surprises pop up, that should leave around $321 for the proposed May Costco raid.
Sounds like a lot, eh? But last month I spent $362.10 at Costco, not counting the gas purchases. The previous month: $394.70. The month before that: $399.43. So, if that expenditure drops to $321, it’ll be a noticeable improvement.
Can it be done? Sure, if I don’t buy any booze. I buy almost all my wine at Costco; by the time you factor in a tax rate of almost 10 percent, that comes to around fifty bucks a month.
$362 – 50 = $312
Well within the desired range.
😀
If you don’t want to spend money in stores, stay out of stores!
Infographics! I love them for their sheer sassy silliness. Here’s an entertainment I ran across on Mashable: Mac vs. PC People. Herein we learn that Macinoids are likely to be older than PC lovers; PC enthusiasts are more likely to live in the suburbs than Mac cultists, Mac fans like modern art while PCites prefer impressionism, and on and amusingly on.
What’s your preference? And how do your other preferences, lifestyle attributes, and personal quirks align with the alleged characteristics described at Mashable?
Pour moi, I prefer the Mac for some of its traits and the PC for others. Wish we could have a computer called, say, the Wallaby, that would blend them both.
{love!}
What’s so great about the Mac?
• Customer service. The world’s most awesome customer service!
• Fewer virus issues. Daring Mac aviators sometimes even fly naked: no virus software at-tall.
• Fewer crashes. Many fewer crashes.
• Fewer update hassles. It just does its thing. And when Apple publishes an update, it rarely requires a vast learning curve.
• Classy style. Oh, I love the look of the beautiful minimalist iMac!
OMG! It changed my life!
And what do I love about the PC?
• Speed. I think the PC runs faster than the Mac, especially for multitasking. A Mac really, truly does not like you to run more than two or three programs at a time.
• Keyboard commands. Garrrrrhhhhh! Word for Mac is still relatively user-friendly compared to the PC versions with the accursed “ribbon.” BUT…all your beloved keyboard commands? The damn things are Mac system commands. Write macros at your peril. Basically, this means point-click-point-click-point-click-point-click ad infinitium nauseum. If you’re used to speeding things along with keyboard commands, making the switch to Word for Mac means a real cut in productivity.
• Cheaper. But…uhm…you get what you pay for.
• Compatibility. Most people have PCs. Some programs for the Mac, such as Quicken, don’t translate to the PC platform.
• Availability: Lines of buyers never stream out the purveyor’s door, wind around the building, and extend out into the parking lot.
Quirks? I live in the city (but wish I was back on the ranch), like impressionism and some modern art, can’t afford to throw parties, prefer real news (the Times) to play-nooz (USA Today), love Rachel Maddow, love Jon Stewart, and wouldn’t be caught dead on a Vespa.
, and two Savings.com coffee mugs
(five copies) and 
(two copies)
