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Side jobs, side worries

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Tomorrow I’m meeting with the editor of a small local press about a freelance job. It’s low-paid, but one of my RAs is freelancing for this outfit and says the work is steady.

For the time being, I don’t need much pay. The amount I’d make in a year would be about 1.5 times the amount I’d earn teaching one course, and the work is a lot easier and a lot less annoying. Two gigs of this nature would out-earn the equivalent of teaching a course a semester, a reasonable load in addition to a full-time job.

I also hope to let her know I’m open for other work and may soon be in the market for a full-time job.

My boss has had my annual review materials for three weeks. All I’ve heard from her is silence.

Meanwhile, today the legislature is expected to cut the Great Desert University’s budget by $50.4 million. My college alone is millions of dollars in the hole, far deeper in the red than at any time in the university’s history. And my job? By no stretch of the imagination can it be seen as “essential.” It supports the university’s mission, but only if you understand that a university has a mission to do research and scholarship as well as to teach. And our state’s legislators and regents never have fully grasped that point.

So I worry: Is the dean silent because she’s waiting to see if my contract will be among those to be canceled? Is she already mulling over ways to show me the door?

This is a recurring worry for me, since I work on a year-to-year contract that can be canceled at will. Under normal circumstances, it’s not much of a worry, because of institutional inertia: replacing me would be a hassle, and so it would take quite a dramatic circumstance to move the administration to do that. However, in the face of gigantic budget cuts, another possibility arises: get rid of me and all my staff. Closing down my entire office would not be a hassle. My RAs’ contracts end at the semester and mine ends on June 30. To get rid of us all, the university simply has to let our contracts lapse.

That strikes me as not unlikely. Experience has shown that silence from the dean’s quarters is often a bad sign.

So it behooves me to start looking around for other work, even it it’s just freelance stuff.

It has to be possible to get by on the reduced collect-at-age-62 Social Security and the proceeds from my retirement savings. My income would drop from $61,000 to $37,760, of which $12,000 has to go to pay the mortgage on the Investment House. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would live on $25,760-pretax! With no health insurance! Health insurance alone, through ASU’s retiree system, would consume another $7,200. How on earth would I eat, to say nothing of support a house?

Be This Way describes how she and her husband arranged to make it possible for her to knock off work. On the other hand: she has a spouse who’s earning a living. I have no one. And SDXB has been insisting for years that Bumhood is feasible for anyone who’s determined to make it work. But: he has a military pension and gets twice as much SS as I will get, on top of his savings. He lives in Sun City, where housing costs are a fraction of mine, taxes are a third as much as mine, and insurance is half of mine. And his idea of “normal” is most people’s idea of “ascetic”—he lives an Extreme Frugal lifestyle as a matter of course.

I don’t want to live like that, and I don’t want to live in Sun City. But if I lose my job, that’s pretty much how it’ll have to be.

Comments from the iWeb site:

1 Comment

BeThisWay

This is very stressful stuff.You’re right in that my situation is very different, and I’m lucky that we have no debt besides my small (under $600 a month) mortgage.

I don’teven knoe you but I have every confidence that IF they close tyour department or don’t renew your contract that you will manage.You’re capable and not afraid to work, and work hard.

Keep us posted!

Ashes

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The plan to use candles instead of electric lights as a feature in the Month of (not-so-)Extreme Frugality requires me to get out the candle-holders. Among the motley crew is an old pair of silver-plate candle-holders that date back so far I think they were a wedding gift.

Badly tarnished, they suffered considerably the last time I used them because I left them out on the patio table, where the ambient smog ate into their silver coating. They’re not what you’d call precious heirlooms.

I’d heard that ashes can be used as a silver cleaner. Well, I wasn’t about to try the stuff left in the fireplace on the Cristofle. But these little guys looked like perfect guinea pigs.

So I retrieved a few spoonsful of ashes from the last time I burned old receipts in the fireplace and mixed in enough water to make a paste.
apr23candlesticks

Lo! It works! In fact, it may work better than commercial silver polish. Here’s a before and after with the ashes. Some light marring of the surface remained, which I suspected might be the ash mix’s fault.

However, when I cleaned the other piece with Wright’s silver polish, similar discoloration remained on that candle-holder. So it looks like the smog pitted or discolored the surface. Whatever the cause, it’s not the ashes. The Wright’s was no faster or easier than the ash mixture, and it didn’t work as effectively on the part that holds the candle, where dirt had combined with wax to form a near-impermeable layer.
apr23candlesticks2

The piece on the left was cleaned with Wright’s; the piece on the right, with ashes.

So there you are: free silver cleaner. Before I throw out the ashes in the fireplace, I think I’ll collect a few trowels-full in a Ziplock bag for future use.

Comments left at iWeb site:

Anonymous

Great idea!

Now what can I burn…?Ah, there’s Husband’s comic books…

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 – 09:35 AM

Michel Savoie

Impressive!! Thanks for the tip! I’d never heard of that one before

Friday, April 25, 2008 – 01:03 PM

Stephanie

Well that is something. It looks great!

Saturday, April 26, 2008 – 02:00 PM

RecycleCindy

What a wonderful tip. I must try that. I have used the ashes from our stove on theicy road by our house. It’s works great for that too.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 – 03:42 PM

Coupons

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So I make a run on the Safeway on the way home from work, neatly combining a shopping trip with the commute. As I’m forking over $68 and thinking the prices have gone through the roof since my last visit, several weeks ago, the cashier hands me a coupon book.

Excellent, I think. This will be my introduction to couponing, a feature of my month of (not-quite-)extreme frugality.

Other bloggers sing the praises of coupons and swear you can get out of CVS with free products by combining cents-off coupons with sales. The purse-stuffing little pieces of paper evidently save costs in many stores, such as Safeway. I’ve never made a habit of using them, mostly because I think they’re a nuisance-I have enough paper to keep track of, thanks-and also because I rarely find a coupon for anything I want. To get the cents off, you either have to buy a product you ordinarily would not buy or switch brands. And when I select a brand, it’s usually for a reason.

Home at last, the groceries put away, and a glass of orange juice poured. Let’s take a look at what we have in the coupon book:

  • Spend fifty bucks at Safeway and you get a free reusable, environmentally friendly shopping bag, advertising Safeway. Unclear whether it’s canvas or just heavy-duty paper. If the former, sure; I’d buy $50 worth of groceries at Safeway for the privilege of carrying around its billboard. If the latter: I have enough paper to keep track of, thanks.
  • Two bucks off O Organics salad mix. Okay, I use that stuff and would be happy to…you have to buy a pound of it? Who do they think they are, Costco? If I buy a pound of cut-up lettuce, half of it will spoil before I can eat it. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
  • Three bucks off a foliage plant. That’s nice. But my house is full of plants. They’re the only part of the clutter I didn’t get rid of during the Late Great Decluttering Campaign, because I can’t bring myself to do in a living thing. So I have enough houseplants to water, thanks.
  • One dollah off two Contessa Green Cuisine Meals. I don’t eat processed, prepackaged food. So this one doesn’t count. Two of them don’t count times two.
  • A dollar off two 12-packs of Diet Pepsi. Ick!!! Wonder if they have a coupon for orange juice?
  • A dollar off a bag of cheddar-flavored or vinegar-flavored potato chips. Uhm…I don’t suppose I could just have the cheddar cheese (real cheddar cheese, OK? not a “flavor”) or a nice bottle of vinegar? I don’t eat potato chips, unless forced to it by famine.
  • Two bucks off Yuban canned coffee. I don’t care for preground canned coffee. They put the cheapest, ickiest, most muddy-tasting coffee beans they can find in that stuff. Moving on…
  • A buck off two SunChips snacks. “Snacks”? No clue what the stuff is, but apparently it’s made at a factory where they use solar energy. There’s a good reason to buy it. Whatever it is, it doesn’t appear to be food.
  • A dollar off Miracle Whip. Ecchhh! What is the appeal of that stuff? I’ve never been able to figure it out.
  • A dollar off Back to Nature Granola. Why? Why would anybody buy granola? I make my own for a tiny fraction of the cost. It tastes better (a lot better), I control the ingredients, and it’s way, way lower in fat.
  • A dollar off four Campbell’s condensed salt licks…oh, sorry, condensed canned soup. Here’s a Warholesque image of a can of tomato soup. Campbell’s soup is another of those processed products that palely imitate real food. And the stuff is absurdly expensive, especially considering that many varieties are little more than “flavored” flour paste. Swanson’s is significantly better and that company offers low-salt chicken and beef broth. It’s mighty easy to make your own tomato soup with a can of tomatoes and half an onion. The stuff tastes ten times better and doesn’t leave your mouth puckered up.
  • Speaking of thirst, you get a buck off two six-packs of Nestle’s bottled water, in The Eco-Shape Bottle. Thirty percent less plastic than the average half-liter. “A little natural does a lot of good.” Haw haw haw haw haw! Funniest darn thing I’ve read in weeks. A plastic bottle is a plastic bottle, dear Nestle’s. Water is water. Most bottled water is tap water. Bottling it in plastic does nothing to improve it. Water sold in any plastic bottles still dumps zillions of unnecessary plastic bottles into the land fills, there to stay for all eternity, until the earth is a frigid cinder circling a burnt-out dwarf star. “A little natural does a lot of good,” eh? A little natural what?
  • Speaking of salt, as we were a moment ago, you can get another dollah off Annie Chun’s Soup Bowl or Noodle Bowl. Yum. To assuage the resulting thirst, pick up a 24-pack of Coca-Cola, rotting your teeth and fattening your belly for a buck off.
  • If you like your sugar intake organic, get yourself two 12-ounce jars of organic fruit “spreads” (and what would that be? we’re not allowed to call it jam or jelly?) or 16 ounces of natural (as opposed to “unnatural”) or organic (as opposed, one figures, to “inorganic”) peanut butter. Could be worse, I suppose. Could be the salted soup or noodle bowls.
  • Buy some “pure goodness”TM for a buck off two packages of Cascadian Farm products. Several strange-looking boxes are pictured, labeled “strawberry,” “oats and honey,” and “organic” somethingorother. Whatever it is, I don’t think I want to put it in my mouth.
  • Fifty-five cents off 64 or more ounces of Silk soymilk. Well, OK, if you think it helps your menopausal symptoms, more power to you. Me, I’ll take a glass of nice, cold water. Tap water. Hold the plastic, please.
  • Fifty cents off Clif, Luna, or Builder’s Bar. “Moving toward Sustainability” is this manufacturer’s motto: we’re told this outfit uses 70% organic ingredients (as opposed to inorganic ingredients), 30% to 50% less fossil fuels than conventional farming (but where does it say here that the company is a farm? it makes candy bars!), 450,000 pounds of shrink-wrap eliminated through redesign of packaging (good, good), 20,000 miles of shipping using bio-diesel fuel (oh, please, please, please smarten up, dear corporate executives!). Bars. It’s bars. Bars of what, we don’t know, but whatever it is, 30% of it ain’t organic. One of them has chocolate chips. Your kids can wash them down with some of that Coke and Pepsi you saved on above.
  • Make your soy Westsoy!” A dollar off four Westsoy, soy, or rice drinks. Urp!

Soylent Green is people!

  • Well, here we have the opiate of the masses: yes, yes, yes!!!!!! FREE (with coupon) BEN & JERRY’S MINI CUP. Yes. Three-point-six ounces of Ben & Jerry’s! I knew these coupons were good for something. We will be dropping by the Safeway on th’way home from work tomorrow.
  • “Organic Herbal Teas for Self Care”” a buck off a couple of ersatz nutraceuticals, teas that allege to sooth your sore throat and stimulate your bowels. For a buck off, you, too, can start a practice as your own snake-oil quack! No nuisancey medical school required!
  • A dollar off two packages of “Nature’s Balance Bath Tissue.” Ah! I used “nature’s balance bath tissue” during that time SDXB and I spent three months sleeping on the ground in the outback of Alaska and Canada. It was called “leaves.” Didn’t cost anything, so we didn’t need to ask for cents off.
  • Fifty cents off a bottle of astronomically expensive Tide high-efficiency detergent. Every penny counts, I guess.
  • A buck off Planet 2x Ultra Laundry Detergent. Take that, Tide!
  • A buck off any Green Works item. Hm. I’ve heard this stuff actually functions. I might try that. Now we have two reasons to go back to Safeway, the Ben & Jerry’s and…waitminit. The stuff is made by Clorox? Clorox is making “natural” cleaners (as though any household cleansers were not unnatural)? Well. No wonder it works. “Made from plant- and mineral-based ingredients.” That explains why it “contains no harsh chemical fumes or residue.” Heaven only knows mineral-based ingredients like petroleum products are gentle, and so are plant-based ingredients like, oh…cocaine.
  • A buck off Purex Natural Elements Liquid Detergent. To their credit, Purex’s ad designers refrain from ridiculous sloganeering, double-talk, and empty phrases.
  • A dollar off All Small & Mighty Laundry Detergent. It’s concentrated. According to the ad copy in the front of the coupon book, concentrated is good. Very good. But I have a lifetime supply of Kirkland out by the washer.
  • Suave has also cooked up a design alleged to use less plastic: 13,863,828 fewer plastic bottles each year! Dang! Could we see the math on that, please? And how do the stockholders feel about your selling that much less shampoo?
  • Method handwash chemical-gel, creamy, or foaming: 75 cents off. Personally, I prefer bar soap. It has less wetting agent, so when you wash your face with ordinary soap, it doesn’t flow right straight into your eyes. Is there a reason we need different products to wash our faces and our hands? What is it?
  • Free box of o.b. tampons. Thank God I’ll never have to use those little gems again.
  • Oh, jeez! FIVE DOLLAH OFF A BRITA PITCHER OR THREE-PACK FILTER! Sold!
  • And finally, two bucks off a package of Duracell rechrgeable batteries, or a charger. Duracell has figured out that “rechargeable” justifies printing the word on the batteries in a green label. Green, rechargeable. Rechargeble, green. What’s inside one of those things, anyway?

Now we have three objects to get on the next shopping trip:

  • 1. 1 free 3.6-ounce container of Ben & Jerry’s (which I would never have thought about without this fine offer)
  • 2. 1 Clorox product, alleged to be, uhm, not unnatural
  • 3. 3 Brita filters. Or maybe a pitcher for the office.

Notice what’s happening here. Though we’ve rejected most of the blandishments, a few of which are come-ons for some truly noxious-sounding (and two or three proven noxious) products, we still propose a trip to the store for three new products, two of which we do not need. One is free. But after the free sample, how many of us will get out of the store without buying a pint (at least!) of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough Ice Cream? Or maybe that double-whammy chocolate stuff? I need the Brita filters, the better to make our tap water potable. But free calories? Another Clorox chemical? In any event, the coupons save six dollars, but I spend whatever the Clorox product costs and whatever the Brita filters cost (plenty, as I recall).

Because you have to buy the Clorox product before May 26 and I already own two gallon bottles of Simple Green, I’m required to buy a product that I don’t need and won’t need for many months…possibly not for a year or two. Come to think of it, three Brita filters are sitting in the kitchen cabinet.

With the exception of a few household products, most of this stuff is junk food or highly processed food “products” that are full of salt, sugar, and weird chemicals. Exactly one item of fresh food appears: prewashed, precut lettuce that a) costs more than a head of lettuce and b) is likely to spoil before one person (moi) can consume it all.

We’ve spent a quarter of an hour leafing through and contemplating this pack of coupons, only one of which really is worth anything. That is, at $30/hour, we’ve spent about $7.50 of my time to save $6 on products that I already have. And…why are these coupons are good for us again?

Monday Household Hint: Hide cords with no special gadgets

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Dunno about you, but I loathe seeing wads of computer cords, lamp cords, and telephone cords laying around the floor. Besides making a ugly-looking mess, they get in the way of Roomba-she chokes on them-and they’re a nuisance when I’m vacuuming with a more serious machine.

You can buy various gadgets to bundle cordage together. But in the first place I’m too lazy and cheap to track the things down and order them, and in the second, people who use them tell me they’re nuisances in their own way.

There’s an easier way, involving hardware you’re likely to have around the house: cup hooks. Got some heavy-duty stick-on Velcro around the house? That’ll work, too.

For a desk with an “apron” around it, get a few cuphooks. Climb under the desk, bringing your handy-dandy electric drill with you. Drill small guide holes, not very deep, about every six or eight inches along the inside of the “apron” or, if your desk top is thick enough, on the bottom side of the tabletop. Screw in the cup hooks, using the guide holes as starters. Then untangle the cords, bundle them neatly, and tuck them into the cup hooks, so that they are held up off the floor and prevented from wadding themselves together.

Here’s how that works:
apr21cords1

These are computer and printer cables, phone lines, and a lamp cord running under my desk.

And here’s how the desk looks to a viewer in the room:
apr21cords2

With the chair in place, the power strips are barely visible. Some of the other cords extend to the right and plug directly into a wall outlet, which is completely out of view. It would be even less cord-cluttered if I would bestir myself to get AirPort. But that might be work. And it certainly would cost me something. Horrors!

A table in the family room has a lamp that has to be plugged in way across the room. Check this out:

apr21cords4

The view from above. Before I secured it under the tabletop, the lamp cord dropped off the table on the right side and ran across the floor under the chair-messy and a hazardous nuisance.

For cords sitting on a table whose backside always will be turned to a wall (that is, it’s not the kind of furniture designed so that someday you might place it in a room where it can be seen from all sides), cut a strip of Velcro three or four inches long. It should be long enough to go over the cords with plenty to spare on either side. Stick one side of the Velcro to the back of the table. Place the cord where you want it, and then place the other side of the Velcro over it, pressing firmly to secure the strips of Velcro together. Do not remove the plastic backing on the top piece of Velcro.

Well…you get the general idea. My PC has had it with uploading graphics and refuses to import these either in Flash or by web browser, & I am tired, having copied & pasted wayyyy tooooo many old posts from accursed iWeb into WordPress. If you want to use Velcro, do the obvious: Stick a strip of glue-on Velcro to the back of a piece of furniture. Press the cords into place and stick the other half of the Velcro, with its gooey backing protected by the plastic backing, over the cords. This will hold the wires where you want them.

Weekend Roundup: New neighbors edition

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This morning as I drove past my old house, I spotted some people moving in! Stopping to say hello, I met a friend of the new owners who was helping the young family to move and was wrestling with the watering system, which (welcome to our neighborhood!) had sprung a leak. He asked if I knew how to get into the system’s control box–someone had shut it and lost the key. Well, Richard the Landscaper Extraordinaire had installed the same make of system over here, so I had an extra little plastic widget, which I lent to them.

I have yet to learn whether it helped, but in the meantime got to see a bunch of my old neighbors, who I miss a lot. It’s good to be further away from the war zone at the corner of Nineteenth and Dunlap and almost out of reach of the unholy construction that’s already started on Nineteenth, but friendly neighbors are worth a lot.

The young family moving in has three kids. The house has four bedrooms, so I suppose it’s doable…but unless two kids bunk together, it means Mom and Dad have no private space other than their bedroom, which in these houses is not large. But then, when we were growing up nobody ever heard of home offices and “den” was a word that meant “family room.” They have all three kids in the mid-town Catholic school, so that’s good, since the public school that serves this neighborhood is notorious as a “problem school.” People move here, put their kids in that school, and forthwith their house goes right back on the market. So if the kids stay at St. Francis, maybe the family will stay in our neighborhood. ?

It’s a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. To the extent that interesting stuff is going on, it’s happening on the Web. Check out J.D.’s startling post at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity asking what the heck you’d do it if was your mom and your sister who stole your identity and racked up 17 grand of debt in your name.

Five-Cent Nickel explains what is meant by “mutual fund correlations” and points to a tool that reveals correlations among Vanguard funds. The Micahs have figured out how to spend their tax rebate: Mr. M. needs a new computer.

Across the Pond, Plonkee has a very interesting post on “the credit card shuffle,” a maneuver calculated to leave you with the smallest interest on your largest debt and the largest interest on your smallest debt. This allows you to follow the Dave Ramsey version of snowballing, wherein you work on the smallest debt (regardless of interest) first to charge yourself up psychologically, but to get rid of the stiffest interest rate first.

At Wisebread, Jabulani Leffal offers up ten ways to go on a date for $20 or less, plus some lively prose.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity pokes a hole in the myth that a 15-year mortgage necessarily saves you more than a 30-year mortgage.

RacerX is back after a short hiatus. Glad to see he’s returned.

SVB offers ten practical tips for new entrepreneurs at The Digerati Life.

Be This Way highlights the brilliance of a Florida state elected representative. We have geniuses like that here in Arizona, too. Just now ours have set aside their prudery in favor of displaying their bigotry.

Trent at The Simple has another one of those posts that make me feel glad I’m past child-bearing age, this one about the infuriating ubiquity of commercials in school curricula. If I had a kid today, you couldn’t get me to put her or him in the public schools, and probably not even in private schools. It’s beginning to look to me like if you can’t afford to have one parent knock off work and home-school a child, you can’t afford a child.

Well, Granma is tiring out, so it’s time to roll up the sidewalk and dodder off to bed. Hope all you young pups are having a wild and wonderful Saturday

Handy li’l Quicken hack

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By accident, I discovered that if you right-click on an entry in Quicken for Mac, you bring up a menu with several options. One is “report on [name of payee]” and one is “report on [category].” So you can create an instant report on a single category.

If you’re curious about how much you’ve spent in one category or how much you’ve been forking over to a single payee, this is very convenient. You can customize the dates to give you a view over a specific period, allowing you to see what’s been going on over a few weeks, months, or years.