Coffee heat rising

Angst

Close Encounters of the Wee-Hours Kind

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Ugh! What could be worse than waking up at two in the morning with a headache?

Well…waking up at two in the morning with a headache, booting up your Mac, and having Firefox try to redirect to an Amazonaws site.

{sigh} Good morning to you, too!

I think Firefox may have blocked it. FF popped up an “invalid certificate” message. Amazonaws is a redirect virus—from what I can tell, it hijacks your browser to a site that tries to sell you fake antivirus software. I was able to abort the tab before it could load. Cleared the cache, then rebooted Firefox and don’t see anything amiss just now. Started Safari: no problem there…at least, not that’s readily visible.

At any rate, everything I’ve been working on over the past several endless days is backed up to an external drive and to the cloud, so if this antique unit is infected, the world will not come to an end.

Nothing much new here. All work and no play is making Funny a very dull girl. I’m still laboring through the phenomenal amount of work involved in building my summer courses with the new scheme to raise their academic standards. I’ve rewritten the calendars and syllabi, cleaned up and revised the PDF packages, replaced the peer review guidelines with the new modified rubrics, scheduled time in the library and computer commons (I hope…assuming they’ll let my classes in as desired). Remaining to do: write weekly modules for 102 course; finish writing weekly modules for the 101 course; create the 101 website; post and schedule modules on both sites; create grade sheets in Excel and upload to Google Docs; create individual reporting gradesheets; set up organizational labels in gmail accounts for TAs. That should take about three more days.

Then I’ve gotta start all over again for the fall classes. Fall course prep has to be done NOW, because these second-session summer courses bump right up against the start of fall classes. There will be exactly zero break between the end of the 8-week 102 course and the beginning of fall semester. So my fall classes will have to be ready to go before these summer courses begin.

Now that the new Lady Cruella scheme is realized, though, it should be relatively easy to recycle the stuff I’ve written for the summer courses. I’ll have to write fall calendars and syllabi. Plus we have a new textbook for 101, starting in the fall, and so the 101 reading assignments will have to be rewritten.

The new text is much superior to the Longman handbook we’ve been using. Unfortunately for me, that means I’ll have to read the damn thing. There’s exactly a month to go before summer classes start…and I’m afraid every minute of that time is going to be occupied with unpaid labor.

In the money department, I’m afraid to enter all the charges I’ve run up in the past couple of weeks. The receipts are sitting in my wallet waiting to be entered in Excel. Though I’ve managed to stay out of Costco, I did go into the terrifying Pier One and spend something over a hundred bucks on decorator items.

Bad human!

Then to make things worse, I so much liked the tube dress from Whole Foods that I decided to go grab another one. They’re not expensive—under $30—but when things are tight even thirty dollah seems like too much. But where clothing is concerned, I tend to operate on the theory that if it fits, it looks good, and you really like it, you should get two of them because you’ll never see them again.

Didn’t stop there, though: got my hair done. Went back to my lady in Tempe, which was an excuse to go out to lunch with my former associate editor and present subcontractor, whose second layoff from the Great Desert University is being spun out over about a year.

Hair lady only charged $50, which is an amazing bargain considering that she produced a style very much like the amazing Shane’s for a little more than half of what he charges. The S-corp paid for the business lunch, so that at least doesn’t come out of my regular cash flow budget.

But a couple of other restaurant junkets most certainly will. Gotta stay out of restaurants and gourmet grocery stores! 😀

Spent some more money at Home Depot, speaking of places to stay out of. Still want a composter, but am not, not, not going to pay $150 for the privilege. I’d picked up one from Costco for $99 (even that was way too much). Brought it home and realized I couldn’t even begin to put it together: it required two people and power tools. Reviews on the Web were replete with people complaining that it took four or five hours to construct, and the job really needed three, not two people. If I’d had Jack the Handyman do it, he’d have charged as much as I paid for the thing.

So, having returned that contraption a couple of weeks ago, yesterday I picked up a plastic trash bin with a snap-on lid. I’ll punch holes in the bottom and sides, load it with vegetable waste, and voila! Compost bin. Secure the lid with a bungee cord, and you can flop it over on its side and roll it back and forth to turn your compost. Cheaper, but still…not what you’d call “free.”

Moving on, my car has developed an oil leak and it needs a new timing belt. Chuck remarked that sometimes oil leaks on that model spring up around some timing belt thingamajigger whose name I don’t recall at this hour; if that’s the case, he wants to change the belt now, not later. Interestingly, though, I don’t happen to have $350 or $400 laying around, not after the late, great dental adventures.

I hate to put a chunk of money into that old clunk. Really, I should get a new (or at least newer) vehicle. But this is not the time. I missed my chance to take money out of a brokerage account for that purpose; with the market plummeting, I’m not about to cash out now. And if I’m going to buy a car, I’d rather wait till the end of the year, when prices are a little lower.

Water bill came in surprisingly low, under a hundred bucks. It’s getting hot enough now that the potted plants need to be watered every day to keep them alive. So I expect it’ll be up to $125 next month. By then, though, a paycheck will be coming in. Mirabilis!

Welp, the headache is easing and it’s not even dawn yet. I’m goin’ back to bed!

Image: Perseid meteor striking the sky just below the Milky way. Mila. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

They’re FOUND!

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New-glasses

It’s been twenty days since I lost my beloved, spectacularly expensive progressive glasses. In the interim, even though it looked most likely that I somehow threw them in the garbage, I’ve continued to look forlornly for them.

Welp, today the wonderful glasses are FOUND!

Amazing grace!

Having finally, late last night, climbed out from under the load of work that fell on my head right at the end of the semester (a hundred thousand words of stoont drivel isn’t enough???), today I determined to clean the house. Really clean it. Among the many tasks that have been awaiting for two or three months was to do something with two old throws I’d folded up and stacked on top of the bureau drawers, for lack of any other convenient place to put them.

One is a white, loose-woven afghan-like thing I bought at Ikea, very soft and pretty until the first time I washed it, when the darn thing shrank and morphed from an oblong into a funny-looking square). But it was still fine for the dog. Then I have this ice-blue cotton throw. It was the middle of the winter when all the folding and stacking was going on—and when it’s 50 degrees in your bedroom, something about a glacier-blue blanket is less than perfectly appealing. I set it on top of the shrunken Ikea throw and convinced myself that this pile was somehow decorative. It’s been gathering dust since the middle of January.

So today I bestir myself to do something with this junk, since it’s time to take the down blanket off the bed. Figure the glacial blue thing can go back on the bed and the misshapen Ikea afghan can go…somewhere else. Pick up the blue thing and what do I find but a familiar temple piece poking out through the fabric the Ikea throw. It’s the glasses! They’re all wrapped up into and tangled into the white throw’s loosely knitted yarn.

Had a helluva time getting them out—bent the nosepiece wresting them free of the synthetic yarn. But there they were!

How on earth the glasses got UNDERNEATH the tightly woven blue throw and tangled up INSIDE the white rag, I can’t imagine. I haven’t touched those things in three months!

Is that strange or not?

Why I Grind My Teeth…

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It took a good three minutes just to open this blank “New Post” in WordPress.

It’s 9:53 p.m.

I started at 9:05. The project: scan two checks, deposit them electronically, pay the amount of one of them to the Mayo electronically, and set up automatic bill-pay to have the S-corporation pay Cox for the DSL connection and have my personal checking account cover $28 a month, the usual charge for the phone.

Between the iMac moving with the speed of a stampeding snail, Firefox hanging the entire system with its damnable “slow script” messages, and the scanner’s glacial operating pace, it took FORTY-FIVE MINUTES to deposit two checks and make two payments.

During the entire three-quarters of an hour, I’m getting exactly ZERO work done. It’s now five to ten. I haven’t had dinner, I haven’t walked the dog, and I’ve lost another hour of time that should have been used to write the SMRH index.

When I started this chore, I figured it would take more time than is desirable. But I didn’t expect it to consume nearly an hour, between the interminable task of scanning and e-depositing two measly checks and the five-minute job of setting up a couple of electronic bill-pays.

That’s what makes me clench my teeth until they break: frustration. And (other than losing a $725 pair of progressive glasses) few things frustrate me more than wasting my time.

Sometimes it seems to me that a goodly chunk of my time is wasted. Maybe half of every day. Between the bureaucratic diddlings-around imposed on us by corporate Web pages and flicking phone trees and the pointless crap inflicted by the government and the endless grinding of computer operating systems, HALF OUR LIVES ARE FLICKING WASTED!

!@#$%^&*!

👿

Blackboard: Always Leave ’Em Tearing Their Hair…

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Un. Freaking. Believable.

But maybe not. Maybe I should’ve known I wasn’t gonna escape from Blackboard without one final pain in the butt.

One hundred thousand words of student writing was to cross my transom come Tuesday. A few eager beavers turned in their gigantic final papers over the weekend, so on Monday I read the early entrants in the course’s final steeplechase.

Blackboard, the bloatware that passes for the course management software favored by the local community college district, should add up each student’s points and then tell you what percentage of the semester’s total available points these figures represent. In the past, it has done so quietly and efficiently, much speeding the process of posting final grades.

So Monday I enter an A-minus (90 points) for a certain student.

Blackboard awards him a final score of 138.6 percent.

No kidding? This is a B-minus student at best. He’s racked up no extra-credit points, and he has missed 50-point assignments. How could he possibly have accumulated more than the total points available?

Whip out my calculator and discover that he in fact has captured 79 percent of the total available points.

Hm. This would explain why one of our brighter lightbulbs, one who indeed did perform a bunch of extra credit and who turned in his final paper even earlier, managed to rack up a score of 148 percent.

Manually recalculate his grade: 95 percent.

Enter a few theoretical final paper scores in other students’ rows. When we say all our children are above average, we’re not kidding!

Try to figure out what the problem is. I must have made some mistake, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. All the columns’ settings are the same, and as far as I can tell, they’re all correct.

Finally have to concede that the only way to figure their final scores without having to punch every number (that would be hundreds of numbers!) into a calculator is to build an Excel spreadsheet that works and import the data into that. Make it two spreadsheets—one for each of the composition sections.

This was not a difficult job, but it was tedious, made more so by the fact that the array of assignments differed slightly between the two sections, so I had to build two separate spreadsheets. Then I had to send out announcements and e-mails to all students in each section explaining why they couldn’t rely on their Blackboard “My Grades” function, how I would be figuring their grades, how to calculate their own grades. Of course this generated a flurry of e-mails from students in High Obsessive Gear. So I got to kill Monday evening farting around with still MORE unnecessary extra work generated by Blackboard.

This will be the last assignment I ever enter in a Blackboard spreadsheet. Starting with the summer term, my classes are moving over to sites created in WordPress.com. Communication will happen through that site and through G-mail accounts dedicated exclusively to specific courses, so that I don’t have to sift through all the junk mail that comes in from the district and two campuses to find messages from students. Grades will be kept in spreadsheets very like the ones I built Monday night. I may put them up on Google Docs, so I can access them from whatever computer I happen to be using. I’ll give students blank, formatted spreadsheets so they can enter their own grades and view their accumulating points and percentages.

Wouldn’t you know Blackboard would pull this stunt on the way out?

Financial Terrors: What’s your worst fear?

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Down and out in Tokyo

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 Commons Attribution-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.

 

 

 

Liveblogging the Budget

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So, here I am, back at the dentist’s office, cooling my heels until he can squeeze me in to deal with the latest little emergency. God only knows how much this will cost. Nothing, I hope. But we don’t bank on hope, do we?

Saturday night the filling he installed a month ago—less than a month ago—crumbled and fell out. with any luck, he’ll stand behind his work, since I haven’t been chewing ice or cracking walnuts with my molars.

However, in all honesty, I suspect he can’t be blamed. The pain from the torn rib muscle has revived my bruxing habit. Well, the bruxing probably never goes away: I’m sure I still clench my teeth on the rare occasions when I’m sleeping. But in the past week, when every minor task like lifting the dog’s dish off the floor has brought a surge of agony, I catch myself clenching my teeth to force myself to keep moving through the pain. When you unconsciously clench, your bite can exert a pressure of 140 pounds per square inch, which no doubt doesn’t help a filling compound.

What with the cost of gas and the ever-rising grocery bills, I no longer can stay on budget. Over the past few months, I’ve run $200 to $320 over budget every month, at first because of the occasional extravagance like the shoes and the cheap jewelry and now simply because it’s costing every penny budgeted just to live. One modest extraordinary expense puts me in the red—and since the budget includes $100 to $150 for unplanned expenses, that means the base cost of living has risen about $100 to $170 a month.

To make up the difference, I’ve been raiding monthly savings (a.k.a. “diddle-it-away money”). But that is a very finite source. If the overspending continues at that rate, my little mini-emergency fund soon will be gone…and then what?

I can use my tax refund, I suppose, but that also is finite.

Welp, it looks like this is what’s gonna have to happen here:

1. Must replenish that short-term emergency savings account; and
2. Must get spending under control.

Putting money back into savings turns out to be relatively easy: instead of transferring a paycheck over to the joint mortgage payment account, I just moved it into the ravished savings account.

I’ve been putting all my community college pay into a joint account with M’hijito, which holds money to cover current and future mortgage payments. Since my share is $8,604 a year and I net $10,800 when I’m teaching three sections a semester, obviously I’m earning more than enough to cover that bill.

Yes. The operative phrase there is when I’m teaching three sections. There’s no guarantee that I’ll always be able to teach three-and-three. First, the school has no obligation to hire me to teach the maximum number of sections available to adjuncts; and second, even when the chair assigns me to teach three sections, if one class doesn’t make, then I don’t get paid for it. The magazine-writing section is particularly iffy. Each semester we’ve watched with bated breath, expecting it to crash in flames. So far it’s always filled at the last minute, but in any given semester there’s a good chance it won’t make. A course load of three-and-two would net $9,000, a scant $400 more than the amount needed to pay my share of the mortgage.

So…as you can see, raiding my pay for $916, the amount I grabbed last week, is ill-advised.

I will use my summer pay (net $3,840) to live on while the extreme heat here pushes living costs to extreme heights. But that won’t begin to materialize before mid-July. In the interim, the horse starves while the grass grows. During the second half of May, all of June, and the first half of July, I’ll have exactly zero income other than Social Security, and so will have to live on savings. And that means I can’t be running over the budget.

So. “Must get spending under control” surfaces as the most important part of the two strategies, and the most difficult.

These budget overruns have been happening while utility bills are very low. I’ve hardly run the heat all winter, and in the past couple of weeks only turned the AC on a few times to knock the heat in the house down enough to sleep at night. Air-conditioning bills will add about $140 a month to the power bill and about $50 a month to the water bill.

How to make $190 materialize out of a budget that’s stretched to the max? Well…not sure.

• Avoid driving, to the extent possible.

All the extra cost here is coming from gasoline. As much as I try to keep it down, what was an $80/month bill just a few weeks ago has jumped to $120+ per month. The weekly trips to the Scottsdale Business Association’s breakfast meetings will end when summer school starts in July, since I’ll have to be in front of a classroom by 7:00 a.m. four days a week. I may have to weasel out of those sooner, though. It’s a wash, though: the school’s about as far away as the restaurant where SBA meets. All errands will need to be folded in with trips to campus, and shopping will have to take place along that route.

What this means in practical terms: I can not drive anyplace for socializing, curiosity, or fun.

• Cheapie down the food bill

More beans, less meat. Unfortunately we’re coming to the end of the season when veggies will grow in my meager garden, so lettuce and other veggies will have to come from the grocery store. I’ll need to buy produce of lesser quality from cheaper stores than Safeway.

• Quit drinking all beer and wine.

That one’s a no-brainer.

• Short the dog on the quality of her food

Watch the ethnic stores, which sometimes run a little cheaper, for inexpensive chicken and pork.

• Let the hair grow out.

Gonna have to give up on the short hairstyle, I’m afraid. Long hair doesn’t have to be cut every four to six weeks.

• Reinstitute the detailed, tightly categorized budgeting system for discretionary spending.

I’d thought I could get rid of the OCD stuff and just keep a running tab: $800 – x, y, and z as the costs came along. But apparently that’s giving me a false sense of confidence. I need to know, at any given time, how much I’ve spent on items like gas, food, clothing, and the like, and how much is available to spend. This does allow me to shift spending in response to unplanned expenses and increased costs.

I figure I drink three bottles of wine a month and maybe three four- or six-packs of extremely fancy beer. At $10/bottle, the wine is running $30 a month, and the $9 packs of beer would add up to $27 a month, for a total, with tax, of  $62.35.  No haircut represents a saving of $50 a month. We’re at $112 right there. Since gas prices sure aren’t gonna go down and I’m already restricting my driving as much as possible, about the best we can hope for is to keep the monthly gasoline bill stable. That’s leaves $78 a month that will have to come out of groceries, at least until my summer pay starts. But let’s remember that, absent unplanned expenses, I’m already running as much as $170 over budget, before the summer bills hit. So the real amount that needs to be economized, with sumer y-cumin’ in, could be somewhere between $178 and $248. A month.

Wow! That’s a lot of beans, eh?

§ § §

Update

Well, no. That wasn’t the new filling that crumbled and fell out of my mouth two days ago. It was the tooth itself.

That’s right. About a quarter of the tooth just fell apart and broke off, for no good reason other than old age and probable bruxism.

So. Instead of one new crown, to replace the chipped crown I’ve been delaying fixing because it’s not doing any harm, now I need two new crowns. The broken molar is in the upper jaw directly above the crown. If my jaws are going to fit together right, both crowns need to be fixed. Now, not later.

For the crowns alone, not counting a new $350 night guard, the tab will be $2,695! And now I’ll have four gold teeth glinting in the sun every time I smile or open my mouth to speak. Lovely.

That’s my entire tax refund!

I’d planned to use that to help me get by during the two months when no pay will be coming in, and then use whatever remained to further delay the time that I’ll have to take a drawdown from my brokerage and IRA accounts.

It’ll have to be done as soon as they can get me in. With the sharp edges smoothed off, my teeth no longer fit together evenly, so my bite is lopsided. Just imagine the headache, jaw pain, and ear-buzzing that will cause.

Oh well.

It’ll certainly make this year’s medical bills tax-deductible, too, just like 2010’s.

😥

Image: Effect of bruxism on an anterior tooth. No artist given. GNU Free Documentation License.