Coffee heat rising

funny

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Does any of this have meaning for individuals?

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Hard to tell, isn’t it?

I just checked my Vanguard funds. Though they lost a little, it’s not enough to drive one out the high-rise window. Doesn’t mean things won’t be worse tomorrow, of course…still, I think it’s best not to study the day-to-day rises and falls of your investments but to keep your eye on the long view.

A pretty murky view just now, it must be admitted.

This morning I spent almost five hours on the application for the new job; still have to write the cover letter.

And I wrote a set of spreadsheets preparatory to meeting with my financial advisor about how to deal with the coming layoff. I wanted to lay out all the relevant factoids: current gross & net pay, projected Social Security entitlement, cost of Cobra ($471 a month! Up from $25), estimated unemployment payments (amazingly piddling–possibly not even worth the hassle of applying), RASL (the amount GDU has to pay for my unused sick pay, an astonishing $17,230), and the estimated amount of my total savings.

Today I learned that GDU has to pay me my hourly rate for 264 hours of unused vacation time: something over $7900. That will help!

Not only that, but I’m also owed 32 hours of use-it-or-lose-it time, for which I will not be paid. So I think I’ll take four days of vacation time starting this week…and not think about GDU even once during the entire period!

With these figures in hand, I calculated several possible scenarios, ranging from retiring today to getting some sort of job. If I can’t get work (and at my age it’s unlikely), things are going to be difficult, indeed.

Oh, well. That’s a bridge to cross later. Maybe not much later…but later.

IMHO, the current stürm und drang will take a while to come home to you and me: not until we see our jobs disappear, credit dry up, and the huge chains that have pushed out local businesses close down—shrinking supplies of food and manufactured goods. That may take some time. With a large helping of luck, it’ll never happen.

What a sad spectacle our country’s grasping, small-minded, doctrinaire partisan politics have spawned. For shame!

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?

Nifty new toy

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The Barbecues Galore grill I bought a year or so ago experienced its third truly scary fire the other day, the second that was certifiably dangerous.

First time, M’hijito was present. The grill has a drip pan for grease, very nice except it’s about an inch above the propane tank. That caught fire in a big way. I’d managed to turn off the burners and was about to approach it with baking soda in hand when M’hijito pointed out that it was so close to the propane and so hot there was some real chance the tank could explode.

Exit the spectators, stage left.

To everyone’s relief, the fire burned out before it had any spectacular effects. After that I was really careful to be sure the drip pan didn’t collect any grease.

Last week the whole darn thing caught fire. It took three or four cups of baking soda to put out the flames, which, as you can imagine, didn’t do the grill any good. Or the remains of the food, not that any of it would’ve been edible anyway.

At this time of year, Lowe’s and Home Depot are having a frenzy, trying to get rid of their unsold barbecue grills. In Arizona that’s weird, because outdoor cooking season starts about in October and extends through May. But those huge warehouse chains operate on East-Coast time, totally out of sync with local reality.

Also out of sync with The Budget of the Coming Depression. Prices of new propane BBQs range from around $300 to around $700. On sale.

Moving on….

Yesterday I picked up a Weber kettle grill, figuring that with the chimney-style charcoal lighter I already had, I could manage somehow to cook the occasional steak or hamburger over charcoal.

Hilarious! In the first place, a part was missing. But more entertaining: unlike the old, sturdy, solid Weber grills, this thing appeared to have been made by hammering out a few beer cans and bending them into kettle shape. It was so lightweight that when you lifted it by the front handle to move it around on its two wheels, it wanted to tip over backward.

Moving on…

Returned that to Lowe’s. Saw nothing else desirable here. Onward to the Depot.

YES! They had the very smoker/grill thing that M’hijito, the Exceptionally Brilliant Chef, uses to turn out incredible food. How much? $157!

One heck of an improvement over the cost of a gas grill, and you can’t blow up the neighborhood with the thing.

Early this morning I put up Gerardo the Lawn Dude to helping me wrangle the thing into the car and then get it out and into the backyard. Being the macho sort of guy he is, he also saw to it, once he’d put it in place on the slab behind the fireplace chimney, that every bolt and nut was solidly tightened down.

It’s really nothing but a metal barrel with vents, a chimney, and some racks. You have to cure it, much as you’d cure a cast-iron skillet, by painting the entire interior & the grills with vegetable oil and then burning a slow fire inside it for two or three hours. It’s undergoing that process as we scribble. Tomorrow: grilled hamburgers par excellence!

Gerardo. As usual, he wouldn’t take any extra pay. I tried to gift him with a half-dozen Coronas and a fistful of tree-ripened limes. He took one, drank it on the spot, and declined the lime.

This is a cultural problem. How am I going to express some appreciation to this lovely man without offending? I’ll think of something. Maybe food: homebaked brownies? He has a cute little kid and a wife who has hit the 21st century running (she doesn’t cook).

Oh, how he coveted the tractor-style riding lawnmowers. While we were waiting for the HD guy to come along with a large piece of equipment to retrieve the last assembled smoker/BBQ from its shelf near the ceiling, Gerardo tried out every one of the tractor lawnmowers. What could a bright, hard-working young man do with one of those things?

Well, I figure at Christmas maybe I can give him a bonus, either cash or a generous HD gift card. Either one, I expect, would go a long way toward improving Gerardo’s business. Must start saving up.

At any rate, thanks to Gerardo I now have a large, down-home, amazing barbecue and smoker Thing that will do handsomely to cook up some mighty fine vittles. And it didn’t bankrupt me.

Thinking about publishing a book?

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My business partner and I just finished editing a book manuscript for a client of a client. Our client is a book packager (an outfit that puts books together for publishers); the subclient is an on-demand vanity publisher preparing to print a book written by the author of a fairly laughable conspiracy theory.

On-demand publishers have their uses and are worth considering if you have a book that will supplement a business enterprise. For example, a friend of mine ran a lucrative business providing in-house communications seminars to large corporations. She wrote a book that summarized the basic principles described in her presentations, which she sold in large numbers to her corporate clients—and also to the general public through the Barnes & Nobles and the Borders of this world. While the book would have been profitable on its own (she had something to say that people wanted to know), it vastly enhanced her company’s revenues.

You may have a subject too limited to your business or your specific interest to sell to a traditional publishing house, but it nevertheless would be useful if presented in a book. Before the advent of on-demand publishing, you could have the book printed and bound through a vanity press, but then you’d be faced with the many headaches of warehousing, marketing, and distribution. Most people who go this route end up with their cars parked in the street, because the garage is stuffed to the rafters with unsalable books. But lo! an on-demand publisher can produce only the number of books you think you can sell at your next dog-and-pony show, or that you want to give away to your 100 best customers.

If your book is adequately edited (so you don’t look like a screaming fool) and decently designed (not a matter to be neglected), a self-published product can be a valuable adjunct to any number of enterprises.

What you should NOT do is pay a vanity publisher to bring out a book that no one else in their right mind would publish. There’s a reason these outfits are called “vanity presses”: they profit nicely from the wannabe writer’s ego. Remember: when you’re a real writer, you don’t pay someone else to publish your golden words; they pay you!

And also remember:
Every writer needs and editor.
[LOL!]

Cutting costs or wasting time?

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Yesterday my Realtor friend invited me to lunch. I was happy for a break, since I’d spent the morning after a sleepless night drafting a job application. God, but applying for a job has become a complicated mess! Useta be you just sent in your resume and had an interview. Maybe you took some sort of skills test. No more! Today you jump through a dozen flaming hoops, explain your innermost self, provide a detailed excuse for every parking ticket you’ve ever had, and write a minidissertation. That’s before they’ll look at your résumé, which had better be machine-readable.

Anyway, my friend came armed with a stack of printouts for houses he wanted me to look at. Argh. I wasn’t planning on spending the entire afternoon driving around the central city, but that’s what we did.

He believes that with all the foreclosures and short sales on the market, we have a chance of finding a place that won’t cost as much to maintain for what I can get for my house. Problem is…what I can get for my house is now very little, indeed. The $325,000 estimate of a few months ago is now down around $270,000 to $280,000…before all the various commissions, fees, and rips are taken off. And while prices in other North Central neighborhoods have dropped, mine has dropped in exact ratio, so that if your house costs less, mine still sells for even less than yours, so I can’t afford yours.

This means that no matter how far property values in my part of town drop, I still can’t afford to move to a smaller, easier (read cheaper)-to-maintain house in a neighborhood with fewer run-down properties and less crime.

The repos we saw were dumps. The one place we visited that was not a foreclosure was in a little 1950s working-class enclave smack in the middle of the midtown high-rise district. The owners, who had lived there a good 30 years, had lovingly patched the sprawling, bizarrely laid-out house together with a series of add-ons, clearly projects they came up with as they had the money. Each room had different flooring, and strange passageways led to hidden bedrooms behind odd doors and long halls. It was, in a word, not to code.

There was a great deal of charm in all the work the couple had done over the years. The charm, alas, will go when the residents go. The house reflected them and was infused by them. Once they leave, it will be naught but a ramshackle pile.

Houses in the little enclave of patio homes I covet, as it develops, have most recently sold in the high 400s, so we won’t be moving there anytime soon.

So it looks to me like the project to find a place in town whose operating costs are relatively low is pretty forlorn. I just don’t think I’m going to find any such palace that I can afford. The only place I can get a single-family home with low maintenance costs and low taxes is…oh yes. Sun City.

I felt like I’d wasted the entire afternoon, when I should have been editing copy and working on applying for the Sonoran Institute job. The effort to cut costs by finding a cheaper place to live not only did not work toward cutting anything that looks like a cost, it wasted time.

If I lose my job—or when I retire—there’s no way I can maintain the house I’m in. This month the regular bills (utilities, etc.) overran the $840 set aside to cover them, and I also overspent the $1,500 “all other costs” budget by $27—even though my only extravagance was about $125 for some inexpensive dishes. Fortunately I have enough in savings to make up the difference. But once my income drops below its present level, I won’t be able to put money in savings. And I probably won’t have enough income to cover the summer bills and also eat.

Guess I need to resign myself to the fact that I’ll be spending my golden years in a ghetto for the elderly.

Unemployment for Christmas?

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Rumor has it that a big announcement is coming down: along about mid-October, the PtB (Powers that Be) will announce that everyone in my job classification is to be laid off. That’s a lot of layoffs, even for a gigantic learning factory whose student body is larger than the entire populations of most of the state’s counties.

The jobs in question are so poorly paid that all Our Beloved Leader would have to do is cut the six-figure salaries of his trophy hires by 5% to make up the part of the payroll that goes to the likes of us.

The rulebook that governs the university’s operation specifies that employees in this category have to be given 90 days notice of nonrenewal or dismissal. Conveniently, if O.B.L. makes this announcement on October 15, our time will be up on the last day of the semester, December 15. This will keep the donkeys in harness until they finish their current round of plow-dragging.

I’ve already found a job to apply for: $15,000 a year less than I’m earning, but at least it’s an income, and the place is only about five or ten minutes from my house. Truth to tell, I could cheerfully forego 15 grand to be free of the hideous commute to lovely downtown Tempe. Last night the freeway was gridlocked; plodding home across the surface streets into the glare of the setting sun took well over an hour. Besides, GDU will owe me $17,500 in tax-free severance pay, to be doled out over three years. A third of that sum added to the proposed new net annual pay will add up to a larger net than I’m now taking home.

Plus the coveted new employer pays ALL your health insurance, AND it offers a “cafeteria plan” that gives you an extra $600 to put toward three pay-it-yourself plans…one of which is a flex plan. So in other words, if you want the flex plan, you don’t have to pay for it out of your regular salary. And, interestingly, instead of automatically taking 7% out of your salary (and matching it) for a 403(b), this outfit offers a simple IRA for which 3% is deducted…leaving you with dollars to put into your own Roth IRA.

So, weirdly, even though the gross pay is lower, the net may be about the same or even higher, with or without the extra income from GDU’s good-bye gift.

It remains to be seen whether this rumor is true. This evening at the Arizona Book Publishing Association shindig, we sat at the same table with a GDU colleague who was privileged to attend our Dean’s meeting with the chairs. She reported that Her Deanship announced, as she had promised to do, that our office is seeking a new client journal.

If our dean’s boss is about to can me, which will shut our office down, why is she telling the world we’ll take on new work? A very limited number of possibilities present themselves:

  • She hasn’t been told about the plan.
  • She is pretending not to have been told about the plan.
  • She doesn’t know what my job classification is.
  • They don’t plan to include me among the cannees.

None of those scenarios is out of the realm of possibility. In fact, they’re ranged in order from most likely to least likely.

WhatEVER.

Next week I’m meeting with my financial adviser to figure out how I can survive if I don’t get another job. This weekend I will fill out a job application, update the résumé, and write a cover letter, to be shipped off to the proposed new employer on Monday. And I will finish editing a freelance client’s copy, earning another $500 this month. The Copyeditor’s Desk is attracting a surprising number of clients—tonight I believe we may have picked up two or three more—and the truth is that we may manage to develop this business well enough so that neither of us will have to work for the university. Or for anyone else, besides ourselves.

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?