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Another Round of the Bureaucrat’s Waltz

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So, after class yesterday afternoon it was off to the downtown offices of the Arizona Department of Administration, there to try to unknot the COBRA mess. This racked up an extra 28 miles on the car’s odometer, draining the gas tank to the point where I needed a refill.

A very nice representative greeted me at the desk. She again informed me I was not registered for COBRA, and after some discussion we ascertained that yes, I am trying to get the hell onto the COBRA rolls. Somehow. Anyhow. Please. With no more runarounds.

She decided that the amount I owed was not $334 but a mere $313. That was nice, since it will cover me through January to the end of February. Earlier reports suggested that I’d be paying $185 a month to continue in my $36/month EPO and continue Delta Dental’s coverage.

The reason for the apparent discount, it develops, is PeopleSoft’s having kept me on the payroll (without pay) until January 10. Since I remained in the records as an ASU employee  into January, ASU’s regular healthcare policy covered me until then. So I got 10 days off the fee for January.

The new $186/month premium will cover health insurance only. After January’s $161 paycheck from the community colleges, obviously I can’t afford the extra $12/month to continue the dental care coverage.

Did I get a receipt for the check I forked over? No.

Did I get a contract or a policy in exchange for the check I forked over? No.

Did I get any evidence whatsoever that I’m enrolled in this program? Not exactly.

She xeroxed the dear-sir-you-cur letter I’d written describing the endless runarounds I’ve been given and asking to be enrolled with no further contradictory stories, appending the check to the bottom the copy of page 2. At the bottom of the page 2-&-check photocopy, she wrote “paid” and the amounts that were owing for January and February.

Whether that will hold any water if push ever comes to shove, I do not know. Whether I will ever see a policy, an insurance card, or any other evidence that I’m actually covered, I do not know.

When I remarked, in summary of the dear-sir-you-cur, that no two of the many people I’d spoken to had given me the same story, she replied, sweetly, that I seemed to be a great deal less confused than most folks who came into the office.

aughhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

throttled

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Funny is experiencing some technical problems and may be down for a day or so. Keep checking back! 🙂

Real estate prices, in progress

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On my old street, just two blocks north of the present palatial dwelling, five houses have gone up for sale. One is my favorite model in this development, and it’s offered through the dominant Realtor in our area.

She was having an open house yesterday, so I dropped by to say hello and check out the place…and, of course, to find out how much she thought she could get for it.

It is a beautiful house. She said the sellers are the original owners, but it sure didn’t have that stale original-owner look to it. All the cabinetry has been replaced with high-quality new cabinets, the expansive countertops (this model has a huge kitchen) remade in granite, the floors paved with a particularly handsome hard-fired tile. The yard is very attractive; a bay window was added to the breakfast room, a new master bedroom extends into the huge backyard, and the pool has been “dry-docked”; i.e., put to sleep and covered with a large, expensive-looking deck. All in all, to die for.

Asking price is $285,000. The Realtor said that works out to $117 per square foot.

Out comes the calculator!

That model was SDXB’s. Without the extra bedroom, his house was 2,100 square feet. In the same year I bought my present home, he sold his for $229,00. That was just at the start of the bubble, long before anyone realized how fast prices were about to run up.

At $117 a square foot, his house would theoretically be worth $245,700 today. Not bad.

My house, however, would only be worth $217,620; I paid $232,000 for it. So it’s still down $14,380 off its proto-bubble price. Better than it was—for a while, the house’s value had dropped to around $180,000. Today Zillow prices it at $236,000, but IMHO a house, like any object, is worth what someone will pay for it. If our Realtor’s estimate is right (she does tend to underprice, but she’s been around for a long time), then at a 3% per year increase, the house’s value will come back to what I paid for it in a little over two years.

Modestly hopeful, I think. Maybe.

Day of simple riches

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Every now and again a rainbow-like day comes along, one of those phenomena that reminds us of what real wealth is all about.

The choir did a lot of singing this morning—the whole chivaree was quite a songfest, lots of Rutter and some rather challenging chant. Very fun.

Escaping from the church, I met M’hijito for lunch. We went to an old stand-by, a place that bills itself as a “bistro” but which is really salad, sandwich, and pizza joint. The food is always good there.

His roommate having announced, at last, that he is moving on, M’hijito grows more interested in getting a dog. We dropped by the Humane Society, where we saw nothing that interested him, but a dog that I thought was enchanting. The keepers there, who tend to the imaginative in designating breeds, claimed he was a bloodhound. Well, I’ve seen bloodhounds, and fer sure that was not one of them. He looked like he might have some hound in him, not a sight-hound, but I’d say he was more lab than hound. Probably Heinz 57 is the right brand name for this guy. He was mellow and sweet and handsome. If I had been in the market for a medium-sized to large dog, I’d have grabbed him in an instant.

But M’hijito is the one who has to live with this proposed animal.

At my house, M’hijito noticed to his amazement that the Christmas cactus is blooming. It’s the first Christmas cactus plant I’ve ever managed to keep alive—I bought it about five years ago as part of the “staging” of the house I sold then. Astonishingly, it has not only survived my ministrations but has blossomed three times since then. He took photos of the amazing ornament-like flowers:

Later, I grabbed the camera and climbed under the plant, backlighting the blossoms with the sun pouring in through the skylight:

He had to go to the office, unfortunately—not the best of all possible things to do with a spectacular Sunday afternoon.

And spectacular it was. After M’hijito left, Cassie the Corgi and I headed for the North Mountain Preserve. No flowers yet, but the hillsides are green with alien grasses brought to the Southwest by generations of Europeans, the seeds blown evenly across the terrain by the wind. Any good rain, such as the recent products of El Niño that have visited us, will green up the desert mountains and eventually produce poppies and mallow and lupine and vast numbers of yellow things. The air still crystalline after the rains, the mountains to the south stood like violet paper cutouts behind the downtown cityscape.

You couldn’t buy a life like this.

Funny’s b-a-a-c-k!

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Funny about Money went down yesterday afternoon while I was gadding about town. It remained down into the evening, when Mrs. Micah contrived to rescue it. Turns out the problem was a corrupted plug-in.

Anyway, the site is back up, and I hope it will stay up. Welcome back, dear readers!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

We don’t need no steenking laundry detergent…

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Frugal Scholar, who must read everything of value on the entire Internet, stumbled upon an amazing remark in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal. In one article, Seventh Generation founder Jeffrey Hollender remarks that it’s surprising most people use laundry detergent at all: “You don’t even need soap to wash most loads,” he says. The truth is, it’s the action of the agitator, not the chemicals, that gets most clothes clean.

Uhmmm… Say what, my Captain of Industry?

Most of us have figured out that we need only a fraction of the amount we were brought up to pour into the washer, partly because newer detergents are far more efficient and partly because you don’t really need even the recommended amount. But…no detergent at all?

Well, of course, the gantlet was down.

Straightaway to the garage, stately home of the washer and dryer! Mustering all my nerve, I laundered two small loads with zero detergent, one of whites and one of coloreds. The whites load included a few pieces of underwear; the colored, a shirt I’d worn for a day of gardening.

The result? Pretty interesting.

Everything came out looking clean. Minor stains that I thought would come through unscathed actually washed out. This pair of fluffy cotton socks, which I wear around the house and patio as slippers, was pretty grimy when I put them in the washer. They came out looking exactly the same as they do when they’re washed with detergent.

These socks, which are three or four years old, always have a little gray on the bottom—no amount of detergent or bleach gets it out. If anything, they actually look a little better than the last time I ran them through the washer.

Peeking into the machine during the “wash” cycle, I found the water looked exactly as dirty as it does when I’ve added detergent, only without the suds:

The “rinse” cycle ran clear as tapwater.

The Sniff Test: By and large, all of the freshly washed clothing came out with an odor: it smelled of clean water! Because I didn’t want to heat-set any residual stains into the whites, I line-dried those; the coloreds went into the dryer. When fully dry, most of the pieces were fresh-smelling and free of either body odor or yukky commercial factory perfume. I use a perfume-free detergent, anyway, so there was no way the clothes would have retained any scent from previous launderings.

A couple of pairs of undies retained a very slight odor. I ran one of these through again with the colored clothing, and after a second drubbing in the washer, it came out completely odor-free.

Isn’t that something!

Conclusion: Because I’m not willing to consume the amount of water needed to run my underwear through the wash twice each week, I would put a small amount of detergent in with those. But apparently most outer clothes that have not absorbed much B.O. and that are not excessively dirty can indeed be washed in plain, clean water, without benefit of factory chemicals.