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Another day, another dollar…

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…and maybe an extra day lopped off the life expectancies of moi and my staff.

When I left for my minivacation last week, the asbestos abatement contractor was busy decontaminating several suites on our floor, by way of moving in some new tenants. A week ago Monday, I walked into the building through a cloud of what smelled like chlorine fumes. The stench inside the office was so toxic it made my nose and throat hurt. I left after a short time; it took three hours for the smell to dissipate from the nose and throat. Yuch!

So now, nine days later, I stroll into the atrium and smell…a smell. It also smells kinda toxic, but it doesn’t resemble chlorine. It gets stronger inside the building, and LOTS stronger inside our office suite. One of the RAs comes in and asks what is that pervasive solvent smell. Solvent, yes.

I call Facilities Management and suggest enough is enough. The FacMan rep says no one has complained of any odors and we should have called the first time we smelled it. I say well, I’m calling now. She says she’ll get back to me.

Several hours later, phone jangles: an all-business woman’s voice on the line. She, it develops, is the owner of the asbestos abatement company, calling to get to the bottom of this. I complain; she says her crew has been told to use a different product, but now it’s FacMan’s job to get the lingering fumes out of the building. Then she says—hang onto your hat, now—that her crew had incorrectly used “a solvent that’s banned on the GDU campus.”

Say what?

“Why on earth,” quoth I, “did you use a banned solvent in a building with classrooms full of kids and offices whose windows can’t be opened?”

“I mean, I just banned it. So after this it’s banned at GDU.”

Fast thinking, Lowest-Bidder Lady!

Shee-ut. What a place.

I sent out two more job applications today, for a total of six.

Interview No. 1

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Yesterday afternoon I had the first interview in the new job search, for a program manager’s position at a prominent local cultural landmark. It seemed to go well. I think they liked me, and it certainly is a job I could do well. On the other hand, I’m pretty long in the tooth. The East Valley Tribune just laid off 120 employees, and so a great raft of people in “communications” will swarm across the land in search of jobs.

If I don’t get this job or something like it very quickly, I’m going to be in deep trouble. With the market tanking, my savings will not support me, not by a long shot. Apparently it can take up to three months after you apply for Social Security to start. If it is true that credit is pretty much nonexistent, selling my house or even borrowing against it to get enough to live on is an unlikely prospect. Unlike GDU’s HR people, the UofA tells retirees that RASL—the amount the state pays for unused sick leave—is considered earned income, not a retirement benefit, and so is taxable at your regular rate. This would cut the annual amount I’m supposed to get for that over the next three years to around $4,000. COBRA alone will cost $5,000 a year. I may end up without health insurance, since I may not be able to pay for it and also eat.

I do not know what I am going to do if I don’t get another job quickly.

At any rate, after the interview I wandered around the grounds and ended up in a monarch butterfly exhibit. There I met a meeter & greeter who was all alone and happy to deliver her lecture on the wonders of butterflies. When I remarked that I had just interviewed for a job, she said she had started there as a volunteer and wangled her way into paying work. She said she loved it; the place is a great place to work.

News from GDU is uniformly negative. The library director at the West campus has been replaced by a part-time interim director whose job, we are told, is to figure out what to cut. Librarians no longer have a budget to buy books, and the president is trying to spread the West campus’s library budget among all four campuses. Staff expect widespread layoffs in the near future.

While strolling around the gardens, I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful to work for a place whose management you don’t hate!

Well, we’ll see. I don’t hold out much hope. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Here’s what it looks like at the place where I’d like to work.


The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5. Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1

Dumb tax

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F’cryin’ out loud. In the “I can’t believe it’s possible to be that stupid” department, here’s a memo: when the binger goes off to tell you the bread dough has finished rising, get up and attend to it!

Yesterday afternoon I was dorking around on the Internet, my favorite time-waster, when I heard the breadmaker hollering “beeeep beeeeep beeeeeeeep,” signifying the dough was kneaded and risen, so I should retrieve the stuff, put it in a pan, and preheat the oven while the bread made its second rise. Did I get off my duff? Ohhh noooo. As I recall, what I did was mutter “please. shut. up.” Then forgot all about it.

Forgot it, that is, until I walked into the kitchen and found the stuff had continued to bubble up, overflowed the container, run down into the breadmaker’s innards, and then, its yeasties exhausted, collapsed back on itself.

That was a fine mess to clean up.

Determined not to lose five cups of flour plus the ancillary ingredients, I had the bright idea of adding a little more yeast, turning the stuff back into the freshly cleaned breadmaker, and letting it knead and rise again.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Lemme tellya: it doesn’t taste good! The result was a large blob of bread dough with a strangely rancid, bitter flavor.

At first I thought I could pass it off as sourdough. On second taste…well, no.

Into the garbage with it.

So, I had to mix and bake a whole new batch of bread dough. This occupied my attention until about 9:00 p.m., annoyingly enough. Dumb tax!

Isn’t it interesting how many of the stupid things that happen TO us are actually stupid things that happen BECAUSE of us? Consider how much of the present financial chaos falls into that category.

Now, I will say: I didn’t vote for our present national leadership and thought anyone who did was nuts; I did not get myself into debt over my head; I do not even run a balance on a credit card.BUT…yes, but: stupidly I left the bulk of my retirement money in the stock market, even as I could see the out-of-control train racing up the tracks. If I was smart enough to think of investing monthly savings (meant to pay off a small loan) in the money market, howcum I wasn’t smart enough to think of transferring at least some of my stock holdings out of Vanguard’s Wellington and Windsor II funds into the same Vanguard Premier Money Market fund?

Right now that moron Bush is on the air saying sure, he knows people are losing their retirement savings, “but I think in the long run they’re gunna be fine.” Long run? That illiterate, bird-brained idiot. When you’re 65, 75, 85 and retired or (as I’m about to be) laid off, there IS NO LONG RUN!

We appear to be a nation of morons who have followed a moron into predictable disaster. I will not disown my personal contribution to the national dumb tax fund, nor, I suppose, can any of us. Our dough has bubbled up, spilled over the bowl’s edge, collapsed back onto itself. The breadmaker alarm has been binging for a long time, while we have muttered “please. shut. up.”

Moments of Fame

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At Girls Just Wanna Have Funds, Ginger has posted the 173rd edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance. She has kindly included one of Funny’s chapters on the job saga, among many possibly more distinguished entries. For example, Silicon Valley Blogger, proprietor of The Digerati Life, offers some wise advice on how to cope with the current market unrest. Over at Living Almost Large, a lively tho’ mostly one-sided conversation is going on about some people’s kids who walk away from mortgages they actually can afford. If you’re feeling a little nervous, you can bring on an attack of hyperventilation by perusing Terence Gillespie’s piece, at YourOptimal.com, titled “Your Optimal Bailout Plan.”On the other hand, if you intend to stay the course, My Dollar Plan has a very interesting piece on strategies you probably haven’t used in your 401(k). Need a break from hyperventilating? Try a little Canadian humor with Big Cajun Man’s Stupidest Bill Ever.

The 146th Festival of Frugality is up at Dollar Frugal, who provides an entertaining Ben Franklin theme. Funny’s story of the pursuit of the new barbecue shows up here, along with a very nice compliment. 🙂 Lots of good stuff in this festival. Free Money Finance reminds us to ask for discounts–and don’t be shy about it. At Saving to Invest, Andy has an interesting tip about a tax-free money market fund. Think Your Way to Wealth sorts all those gas-saving tips we’ve heard into fact vs. fiction. And Cheap Healthy Good reports on the new country of origin labeling that we soon will see in the grocery store.

Living Almost Large hosts the 79th Carnival of Money Stories with a fun (and funny!) cartoon theme. The “beat the stress” chapter of Funny’s layoff saga appears in this carnival. And oboy! Here’s another update in the Blueprint for Financial Prosperity story of Jim’s garden project! Since I just filled up the backyard flowerbed and a gigantic pot with vegetable seeds in preparation for coming unemployment, this tale has taken on special significance. SVB posts a thoughtful rumination on bailout pro’s and cons that has spawned a long series of interesting reader responses. And at Simply Forties, Mary tells the story of a very fine money day.

The Make It from Scratch Carnivalappeared at Make It from Scratch. Funny’s discovery that you can clean your kitchen cabinetry with baby oil was among the many entries. Check out Almost Frugal’s incredible endive-gorgonzola soup, which she reports is offered in France as a recipe for small children. I actually looked for gorgonzola when I was at Costco yesterday (they often have a very nice version, but not at the ghetto store near my house, alas)…next time I find it, yum! More my speed in the upcoming days of unemployment is Cheap Healthy Good’s low-down curried root soup, which sounds like delicious comfort food and may be affordable on the dole. At Little House in the Suburbs, the Tomato Lady explains how to make home-made whole wheat pita bread, mighty tasty-looking. At Stop the Ride, Stephanie shows how to help the kids make personalized drinking glasses—lots easier than kid-painted ceramics, and just as fun.

How low can I go?

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Tomorrow’s job interview is with a nonprofit organization. So neat is this outfit that I had earmarked it as the first place I would do volunteer work after retiring. The job sounds like more fun than life, and frankly, if I could I would pay them to let me work there. However, I can’t afford that: for the next three or four years, I still hafta make a living.

Because it’s a nonprofit and the ad is for someone with a bachelor’s degree and three years’ experience, I’m assuming they’re budgeted for a low salary. Of course, GDU is a nonprofit, of a sort; and what I earn is pretty middling. Others whose jobs are related to my kind of work earn more. Nevertheless, my salary is exactly at the total income for an average four-person family in Arizona—meaning, I imagine, that I earn about twice the average Arizonan’s wage, since most families have two earners.

That notwithstanding, my expenses have expanded to fill all my income’s available space. So, if this proposed new employer offers me half of what I’m earning, I can’t accept it, because I wouldn’t have a chance of living on it. However, because I’m over 59 1/2 and can draw down my IRAs, I could get by on a significant pay cut. Drawing down the amount my advisor and I had planned when I retire would make this possible. And since I could in theory retire right now, there’s a certain demented sense to the idea of taking a small draw-down to supplement a reduced salary.

A reasonable amount to expect from this source is about $10,000 a year, since I’m already using part of said planned drawdown to cover my share of the Investment House mortgage.

I figured out how much gross salary I would need to get by in several scenarios. The amount I’d need ranges from $47,000 to $50,720, depending on a variety of circumstances. Then I estimated net pay on those amounts, given that my current net pay is 63% of gross. From these estimates, I calculated how much I would get monthly, and what a single paycheck would be if paid bimonthly and if paid biweekly.

Charmingly Excel crashed when I tried to get rid of the page break lines in one worksheet (does anyone know how to un-show those things?). This lost all the data I’d worked on today…though I’d have sworn I saved at some point along the line. Must not have.

At any rate, if M’hijito pays $100/month more toward the Investment House mortgage (he says he could cover more than that, actually) and I pay off the Renovation Loan, I still would have enough in savings to make it possible to live on the net income from a $47,000 salary, and to do so without serious pain.

Although the Renovation Loan’s monthly payment is fairly modest—only $170 a month—during the winter months it’s my largest monthly bill, and during the summer, the second largest. In addition, I’m setting aside $204 a month to pay toward principal. I haven’t been paying it directly to the principal each month, because I foresaw something like the present chain of events and figured I’d better save all the paydown money in cash accounts to double as emergency funds. The monthly set-aside figure—the maximum I can pay after all my other bills are covered—brings the ding on my monthly income to $374, which for me is significant. It’s twice my largest winter bill and $150 more than my largest summer bill. Get rid of that, and I can live on a smaller salary.

Well, we may find out tomorrow what the proposed new employer can pay. Let’s hope it’s enough!

The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5.Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1

Some vacation…

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I took off the four days of use-it-or-lose it time I’d accrued on top of the 267 hours of time My Beloved Employer has to pay me for if I get laid off. Tomorrow is the last of those four days.

With vacations like this, we don’t need salt mines. When I wasn’t sweltering with figures trying to calculate how (if) I can get by without a job, frantically conferring with my financial advisor,and negotiating with potential Copyeditor’s Desk clients, I was filling out job applications or throwing myself around the yard trying to catch up with several months’ worth of neglected gardening chores. Today I tackled the front courtyard: hauled three jammed wheelbarrowsful of plant trimmings and debris out to the garbage can. The other day I hauled two of the same out of the backyard. There’s still a lot to do—more pruning, more cleanup, more hauling. Today I worked until I couldn’t stand up anymore and then collapsed on the sofa and fell asleep.

There’s a phenomenal amount of work around this place that Gerardo doesn’t do, for the grandiose $75 a month I pay him. Grr! I asked him to trim the Texas sage in front. He nipped off about three twigs, far as I can tell. I cut it down two or three feet—quite a trick to do that without turning the thing into a futbol. I like my desert plants to look like desert plants, not like sculptures of soccer balls, but that doesn’t mean I want them to run amok.

Day before yesterday (was it that long ago?) I shoveled the last of the moribund flowers out of the poolside flowerbed, spaded the compost from the bin into the soil, and chuffed the bin full again with new plant debris. Having decided I’d better have some food growing if I was about to be out of a job, instead of flowers I planted beets, chard, carrots, red scallions, and bush peas. And one hopeful tomato, not likely to produce before the frost—but nothing ventured: it was only a couple bucks. One of last spring’s tomato plants survived the summer (a rarity!) and is blooming, so it may produce before winter nips it back.

The package of bush peas held many more dried peas than I had room to plant. Then the light dawned: around the base of the queen palm! Of course! It gets watered by the bubbler that overflows onto the queen palm from the Meyer lemon, and the palm’s trunk is a natural trellis (tho’ supposedly trellissing is optional for these plants). This meant I had to dig up the desert landscaping to plant the peas, which I really didn’t want to do. So I troweled little “cups” into the crushed granite, cut open the fabric ground covering underneath, planted the each seed in the dirt, and then packed the cup with a mix of dirt and potting soil. This was a chore: those guys who landscaped the backyard dumped four or five inches of Madison Gold Minus Three out there. Digging it up is not a joke. The result looks pretty ugly, but the plants should cover it up, and after they’re spentit should be easy enough to shovel the gravel back in place.

I also filled a big pot with soil and planted a bunch of the peas in there. Pruned roses, cut back some other plants, fertilized and watered roses, dug the dead clover and dichondra out from between the flagstones. What killed that stuff? Gerardo thinks it didn’t get watered, and I will say: it was dry. But it’s been thriving all summer—just suddenly keeled over. Pearl mites?

The watering system doesn’t seem to be working. A couple of sections are nonfunctional. So…why are my water bills through the roof? I suspect there’s a leak somewhere.

Coping with that is more than I can deal with just now, and so I think I’ll probably shut it down and drag hoses. Argh.

Cleaned the hummingbird feeders, made new hummer food, reloaded and rehung the feeders.

Backwashed the pool, refilled the filter with diatomaceous earth, treated the water. It needs a chlorine shock treatment, which I will administer once it’s REALLY too cold to swim. We’re right at the verge of that: this afternoon it was mighty crisp, but it still felt soooo good after spending four or five hours sweating in the sun.

Today trimmed part of the desert willow (didn’t do it much good; had to get the saw out to cut one limb) and the Texas ebony. Invented a system for tying the bougainvillea to the block wall without drilling into the wall and without gluing hooks to the wall. Pruned the bougainvillea and tied it up. Pruned the Texas sage. Cut my foot open on a cactus; bandaged foot, dug out spines; drove one spine in too deep to get it out. Trimmed back the palo brea and the vitex. Hauled heavy metal chairs back and forth. Moved the rustic (read “rusty”) iron crucifix from behind the boug and figured out how to hang it on a different wall without having to drill another hole. Dug the dead grass and weeds out from between the flagstones. Took the scissors and trimmed down the overgrown, leggy, dried-out Mexican primroses. Jammed two communal garbage barrels full of trimmings and plant debris. Left an incredible mess on the ground to shop-vac up after resting. Repaired the pool cleaner & got it running again.

And now I need to get up and finish the job. But first must dig the out the thorn, which hurts.

Ain’t homeownership grand?
EveningUpdate
Fed dog; dog evidently not annoyed by spinach (human having run out of preferred veggies), which she normally picks out and daintily sets on the floor: food dish emptied and chased around the kitchen floor. Dug cactus spine out of foot, accompanied by some profanity. Dragged shop-vac to front courtyard to inhale up leaves, compost, and dirt. Cleaned out four clogs, left courtyard looking about 110% better. Paused to feel smug. Dumped plant debris, compost, & dirt into compost bin. Cleaned out shop-vac; washed filter (did you know you can actually rinse out one of those expensive paper filters that come with shop-vacs? yesh!). Put shop-vac away.
Fired up BBQ; cooked a couple hamburg patties and some freezer-burned mystery meat for dog; cod filet for human. Incredible dinner: how did this happen?
Accidental Wonderful Dinner
You need:

§Charcoal grill
§Charcoal
§Hardwood chops (hickory chips were on hand)
§Filet of firm-fleshed fish such as cod or salmon
§1 cup rice (I used converted; you could use regular white or brown rice but try to avoid instant rice…ick!)
§Olive oil
§21/2 cups water or broth; a little wine or sherry optional
§Chives or other herbs
§Asparagus
§Tarragon or other herb, to taste
§Small blob of butter or splash of olive oil
§Tinfoil
§Your favorite way to light coals
§Fresh lime or lemon
Step 1: Start the charcoal. Set the hardwood chips to soak in cold water.
Step 2: While the charcoal is firing up, pour a little olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add a cup of rice. Let this turn golden brown; stir now and again. Pay attention: once the browning starts, it can move right along. When the rice is evenly brown throughout, add2 1/2 cups of some sort of liquid. Since I was sharing this with the dog and I had no chicken or beef broth, I used water only. If no canine roommates are in the offing, mix and match to your taste. Sherry is a nice blandishment; so is white wine. Combine about 1/2 cup of either with broth or water. Whatever: add to the rice when the rice is browned, turn the heat down to medium-low, and set the timer for about 25 minutes if you’re using converted or about 35 or 40 minutes if you’re using regular white or brown rice.
Step 3: Wash and trim the asparagus. Set it on a sheet of tinfoil. Add a small blob of butter or a splash of olive oil; top with pinch of tarragon or any other herb that suits your fancy. Wrap tightly in tinfoil.
Step 4: Check on charcoal. Pour yourself a glass of wine or beer. Supervise in a desultory way until the charcoal is ready to use. At that point, place charcoal in grill (if it’s not already there; I use a chimney, so have to dump charcoal into the BBQ when it’s covered with white ash). Drain water off wood chips and toss wood chips on top of charcoal. Place grill over delicious charcoal and wood chops.
Step 5: Place the tinfoil package of asparagus over the heat. Rub a little olive oil over the fish and put the fish over the heat. Close the cover.
Step 6: Continue drinking and supervising. Keep an eye on the rice: don’t let it burn dry. When you flip the fish over, also flip over the tinfoil package. Watch rice.
Rice, fish, and veggies should get done at about the same time. Test fish by gently pushing apart with a barbecue spatula. It should flake but not be dried out.
Step7: Retrieve fish and asparagus from grill. Serve on plates with rice and juicy cut lime or lemon. Add some chives to the rice, if available, or dried herbs and a little butter. Be prepared for dog, if available, to try to sponge dinner from humans.
Step 7: Eat. Enjoy.
And so to bed.