Coffee heat rising

Angst

Live-Blogging from Elm Street…

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4:00 a.m. sharp: Burglar alarm goes off.

Sumbitch. Someone’s trying to get in the westside Arcadia door.

My pistol’s not loaded, and even if it were, the ammo is so ancient it would probably blow me to Kingdom Come before it did in the burglar.

Dial 911 while re-securing the side door. Can’t see anyone out there. It’s been raining half the night. What kind of idiot goes a-burgling in a rainstorm?

Oh wait: I forgot. The Son-in-Law. Madness knows no weather. He must’ve gone off his meds. Probably one of the 280,000 folks our esteemed legislators are throwing off Arizona’s answer to Medicaid.

Must remember to buy some new ammo and make a few runs on the range for some target practice.

Dispatcher: “Do you see or hear anyone outside?”

Homeowner: “No. But there’s no way this door could move unless someone tried to open it.” Homeowner privately thinks it’s a damn good thing she dropped a stick in the runner of the thing; otherwise the guy would’ve been in the bedroom by now. Dog slept through this episode and didn’t bark even when the alarm went off.

Dispatcher: “Well, we’ll send an officer over. If your alarm goes off again, call us back and we’ll up the priority.”

Homeowner: “Thank you.”

Up the priority? So it’ll be 45 minutes or an hour before a cop shows up here? Gaaaaaaahhhhhhh!

Taking a shillelagh in hand, I sit down to write this by way of passing the time. Nothing like a computer screen to make time fly.

Speaking of upping priorities, I have got to get some new ammo for that gun! Come to think of it, what I’ve gotta get is a shotgun. Maybe I can buy or borrow one of SDXB’s. Shotguns are far more effective against burglars: your aim doesn’t have to be good to do some serious damage. Also, burglars are allergic to the mere sound of a pump action.

Apparently my burglar was allergic to the sound of small plastic battery-operated window alarms, too.

These little contact alarms are great. Small and unobtrusive (especially if you have white window frames), they emit an ear-piercing shriek when a window or door is opened. I bought a passel of them after I realized a) I couldn’t afford to keep paying the burglar alarm company a monthly fee; b) I couldn’t afford the city fines for false alarms, which are frequent and random; c) I highly resented having to pay the city an annual license fee for the damn thing; and d) I was running out of patience with the sleazeball who ran the alarm company. Canceled the service, turned off the system and alarmed each door and window separately. Alarmed the security doors and some of the screen doors, too.

They’re a bit of a pain because you have to remember to set them when you close the door, but after a few times it becomes automatic: when you lock the door or window, you flip the switch to “on.” That is a lot less of a pain than false alarms, dodging around a system every time you come home from the grocery store, hurried calls to the cops and the alarm company to assure them the latest episode is not a real burglar, and dealing with a jerk of a company owner. And they do not do false alarms. The only way to set it off is to open the switch, and the only way you can do that is to move the door or window about an eighth to a quarter of an inch. Rain, wind, thunder, and passing F-16s do not set them off.

A good-sized earthquake might cause one to go off, if it moved the door or window. But I believe the dog and I would’ve noticed an earthquake.

The cops show up. They walk around. They don’t see a burglar. They leave.

Welp. Five hours till I have to show up for choir. Rain has started to pour again. The adrenalin high is beginning to wear off, so now I’m starting to feel hungry. Guess I’ll get some breakfast. Maybe there’ll still be some time to go back to bed…

Ten Ways to Deal with Bag Lady Syndrome

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A comment from reader KML on my recent “bag lady syndrome” piece moved me to think more about this subject. I was going to enter a response as a comment to that post, but by the time I finished typing realized the result was itself a post. And so, more on women’s fear of a destitute old age:

Says KML: Thank goodness! I thought I was the only one who has this “syndrome” I seriously worry about being out on the streets simply bc I am single and have no one to fall back on.  I have a comfortable house, good job and a few dollars in the bank, but I still have this irrational fear.  Thanks for your post, I feel better just knowing that I’m the only one who wories about this. . . .

@ KML: It’s unclear whether a real psychological condition fitting the description of “bag lady syndrome” exists. It’s a pop-psych/pop-soc term. When you try to track down a little science on the subject, the best you come up with is that some psychologists think it’s a type of anxiety disorder.

Well, to my mind it’s perfectly rational to be concerned about whether your resources—savings, Social Security, kids who can help support you, whatever—will cover you until the end of your life, especially in a time when many people now in their 50s and 60s can expect to live into their 90s…and maybe beyond. It becomes a “disorder” when worrying about your financial security begins to inflict damage on your quality of life. Fear of destitution seems to have been observed among Americans , when psychologists Aaron Beck, Gary Emery, and Ruth Greenberg noted that one man anxious about the future was much helped simply by setting up arrangements to care for his family: talking with financial advisers, writing a will, taking out insurance policies.

A father’s concern about the well-being of his wife and children should he die, of course, is different from a single woman’s concern about her own future. To take advantage of a life insurance policy, you have to die…and that seems counterproductive.

However, whether you’re a man or a woman wondering about the future, I do think you can take a number of steps that help to alleviate that nagging worry:

• Plan your retirement income with the help of a financial counselor.
• Budget intelligently.
• Try to get yourself into a paid-off dwelling, if at all possible.
• If that’s not possible, seek comfortable, safe lodging at a reasonable rental.
• Try to get a reliable, paid-off vehicle that will last for a long time.
• As long as you’re physically able, arrange an ancillary income stream with a part-time job or by monetizing a hobby.
• If you can afford it, buy long-term care insurance.
• If you have a partner or a family member who will require care after you’re gone, buy life insurance.
• Schedule time once a month to reconcile bank accounts and pay bills; avoid thinking about finances at other times.
• Get out of the house frequently, so you don’t sit around stewing.

Most of us can do many or all of these things. And really, maybe the best thing we all can do for ourselves is to recognize when we’re worrying to much and decline to continue with it. As Scarlett O’Hara reminded us, “Tomorrow is another day.”

The Organizeder I Try to Get, the More Disorganized I Am

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What is it about basic organization that I seem incapable of mastering? I imagine I’ve kept careful records, I delude myself that four drawers full of carefully categorized file folders have organized every important piece of paper that comes into the house (and thousands of faintly important, maybe-important, and irrelevant pieces of paper). In my mind, it looks good…if sometimes cluttered. I am, in a word, organized!

Well, until someone asks me a direct question. Last night the new accountant e-mailed a few innocent queries.

No. 1. How much is your social security income before taxes and medicare deductions?

Uhm…not very  much.

No. 2. How much is deducted for Federal and AZ taxes?

Too much?

No. 4. Did you receive a statement from the state of AZ showing the taxable amount of your sick pay?  Were any taxes withheld?

You would think so. But if I did, I can’t find it. Yes, taxes were withheld. The only record I can find is notes on a telephone conversation with the lady who runs the RASL program.

No. 5. Please forward a copy of your latest MCCD pay stub.  The one I have is dated 09/24/2010.

Okay. You do realize that through this entire semester, no two community college paychecks have been the same? Does that matter?

No. 6. How much was your Fidelity IRA distribution?  Was it from a Roth or a regular IRA?  Were any taxes withheld?

Who, what? Where, why? When?

No. 9.  Are you getting a new A/C unit that will qualify for the tax credit?

Far as I can tell. The AC guy says it’s worth $1,500.

The only reason I could answer that last one is that the receipt is still sitting on my desk, yet to be filed.

Social Security totally flummoxes me. After they took away an entire month’s benefit check as punishment for my having committed the sin of earning a few bucks more than the earnings limitation, they turned around and announced they had recalculated my benefit and were raising it. I have never been told the dollar amount that is withheld for federal taxes, and as far as I know Arizona doesn’t tax Social Security. If it does, I don’t know how much or whether Social Security withholds state taxes. When I try to figure out what the gross must be, assuming they’re withholding 15% for federal tax and nothing for state tax and $110 for Medicare, I come up with a gross on the new “increase” that’s smaller than it should be if I were paid the original gross the entire year.

Such a vast flood of paper pours into my house that I’ve developed a flinch reflex about any form to fill out, any document from a threatening official agency such as the federal government or an insurance company, and most anything that requires a response from me. Every day I walk past the recycling bin coming in from the mailbox and dump everything that looks like advertising or pointlessness into the trash. The mailman delivers so much garbage that in a week the four-foot-high bin is half-full before I’ve tossed the newspapers and all the overwrapping that swaddles every product we buy.

That still leaves me with mounds of paper to have to sort through, try to understand, figure out what to do with, and file. Right now, after just a week, my desk and kitchen counter are covered with the stuff!

And file it I do. But once it’s filed in those tidy drawers, it’s effectively lost.

Oh god. Just writing about this is giving me another throat spasm. I’ve gotta get up, feed the hound, and go for a walk.

Is this REALLY necessary?

Image: Paper recycling in Ponte a Serraglio, Italy. By H005. Public domain.

Wait. You think I exaggerate? Check this out:

The boggle minds!

Christmas Is for Friends

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Melancholia I

A few days ago over at a Gai Shan Life, Revanche described spending Thanksgiving with a friend, having opted a trip to visit her perennially stress-inducing relatives. Though she was obviously relieved to have freed herself from another angst-filled holiday, you can almost touch the guilt vibes coming off that post.

Is there one among us who does not feel this?

The purpose of family is to spoil holidays for adult children, siblings, and cousins. It’s part of the cosmic order.

I find Christmas especially depressing, because my mother loved it so and made a very big deal of it. She learned her flair for Christmas celebration from her grandmother, who turned Christmas into high performance art. It was the holiday for us. I miss my mother a lot, and I miss her and her family the most during Christmas.

My stepmother, who came on the scene shortly after my mother died, practiced her own art of making Christmas miserable. Like many who loudly pretend to be followers of Christ, she was just downright mean. It took a long time before I realized she was doing it on purpose: exploiting holidays to stage a hurtful remark or a nasty stunt. I finally figured it out when she tried to do a number on me at Easter. Unlike her tribe, my family, not being worshipers of the man from Galilee, didn’t celebrate Easter. So when she threw a zinger at me that spring it had no effect…except to make it clear that she thought I would be missing my family and that she was taking the opportunity to reduce me to tears again. Later her daughter revealed that I wasn’t the only target of her machinations—that she’d been doing it for years to everyone around her.

When we were young, my husband and I used to get together with our best friends the weekend after Thanksgiving and throw a magnificent feast, which we called TGTGIO: Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over! Turkey was absolutely out of bounds, and so the focus of dinner would be roasts like leg of lamb, duck, prime rib… My friend Barbarella could REALLY cook, and so could I.

It went a long way toward making us feel better.

Later, when I could no longer stomach another Midwestern meal of flat white stuff (the new relatives favored overcooked steamed Butterball turkey, mashed potatoes with the consistency of library paste, and cauliflower, accompanied by “salad” of canned fruit in lime Jell-O), we would bundle the kid and ourselves in the car and drive 12 hours (one-way) to Grand Junction, Colorado, there to spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s mother. It was a desperation move. Just imagine: driving 24 hours, often through blizzards and over long stretches of black ice, to get out of spending three or four hours with that bunch!

I wasn’t a lot fonder of my mother-in-law. She was so powerfully opinionated that she believed her every thought, no matter how cockamamie or faddish, was dead right, and if you didn’t agree with her in every detail you must be a blithering fool. However, she was at least neither deliberately mean nor stone stupid. Since she admired intellect no end, I could safely bury myself in a book all the time we were there, avoiding most confrontations.

Well, all those people are gone now or nearly so, and though I will confess to an occasional moment of loneliness at the holidays, I certainly don’t miss those who went out of their way to create unhappiness. M’hijito’s circle has developed a holiday tradition of putting on a big party for all their young friends, and the older generation is invited to that. It’s a great deal more fun than any of the true “family” holidays many of us experience.

They say Generation X substitutes friends for family. Maybe that’s as it should be.

Ebenezer Scrooge celebrates Christmas with Bob Cratchit

Images:

Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I. Public domain.
John Leech, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit. Illustration for Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Public Domain.

Bit$ and Piece$: Live-blogging from Hell

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Another day, another dollar…in which I didn’t get to do anything I wanted to do but ended up working in front of the damn computer all of yesterday. Shoveled another mound of stoont papers off my virtual desk, but didn’t even get to write a blog post.

And…for crying out loud, now as I sit here at 6:30 in the morning the Google calendar tells me I’m supposed to be in Glendale at the Miles of Smiles breakfast for Andrea’s Closet. And I’m also supposed to be waiting for another air-conditioning guy. And I’m supposed to be getting ready to race to Scottsdale for another meeting with another doctor. And I have no idea what the calendar notation for today’s English 101 class means: “Logic exercise: in-class discussion.”

Logic exercise? I have a logic exercise for them? Where? What?

Augh!

Yesterday my neighbor Carol’s AC guy came by in the morning. She was right: he is chatty. He occupied a good hour of my time, but he at least seemed to be honest and straight-talking.

He said the coils on the air-conditioner are shot, bashed by the hailstorm. He also delivered another little revelation: the over-and-under design that characterized the old Goettl AC units is no longer being made, except by one not very good air-conditioning manufacturer. The new ones are side-by-side, and because of the unit’s shape, it will cover up the bathroom skylight!

This little revelation was not something that was delivered by the other guy.

Those skylights cost a ton of money to install. And I can guarantee you, I do not care to have a skylight shaft carrying the eye upward to the bottom of an air-conditioning unit!

So he’s going to track down the cost of an over-and-under unit (i.e., one where the air intake and exhaust vents are arranged vertically instead of horizontally), and he’ll try to find out if anyone makes a more conventional unit that might fit up there without wrecking the skylight.

Meanwhile, the Mast air-conditioning guy is supposed to show up this morning while I’m supposed to be at the Mayo Clinic. He, of course, does not know about the hail damage, because this is the outfit I’ve been trying to fire. Last spring I paid the annual fee to have Mast come and perform the regular twice-a-year maintenance and inspection for both my house and the downtown house, so, despite their new guy having annoyed me beyond endurance, I decided to just quietly let them show up here and do the job, even though secretly I was auditioning other AC guys. Normally they can do their thing without anyone being home, but of course this fellow, the one who tried to high-pressure me into buying a new unit last spring, is going to jump for joy when he sees the bashed-in coils.

I really need to be here when the guy shows up. Guess I’d better cancel the doctor’s appointment.

Carol’s AC guy remarked that he thought the roof showed some damage, too. We’ll know about that when the roofing guy surfaces…I’d better call those people and nag them, come to think of it. And I’ve got to get these people down to M’hijito’s house, too—if my air conditioning and roof were trashed, his probably were, too. His policy has a $1,000 deductible. So with my $2,000 deductible, we could be looking at an outlay of three grand up front…for starters.

If the AC guys have to rebuild the ductwork to save the skylight, I presumably will have to pay for that out of pocket, and it’s anyone’s guess what it will cost. Plenty, you can be sure.

Oh, god. It’s twenty to eight. I can’t even begin to see how I’m going to get to the doctor’s office this morning—it’s an hour’s drive each way. I can’t write a “logic exercise”—whatever the hell I thought that was going to be—and drive two hours to & from a doctor’s office and sit in the doctor’s office for an hour while contending with an air-conditioning guy 30 miles on the other side of town. I’ll have to cancel the quack and hope whatever this new manifestation is ain’t anything serious. At least it hurts less today than it did yesterday. And if it’s what I think it is, another day or two or three won’t make any difference…I’m gonna die anyway.

Okay, so: trying to figure out how to cope with this new financial hit. If nothing is wrong at M’hijito’s house, the minimum cost of this fiasco will be around two grand. I may (or may not) get $1,500 back from the government as a rebate for buying a high-efficiency unit. If I buy a Lennox—which will cover up the skylight—I’ll get another $250 back from that company. But revamping the ductwork and fixing the resulting damage to the roof will cost one helluva lot more than $250. In fact, it probably will cost more than $1,750.

The over-and-under unit does not qualify for the $1,500 rebate.

So I suppose we’ll have to assume I’ll get exactly zero reimbursement and I’ll end up with a unit that costs just as much to run as the old clunk on the roof now does.

The $2,000 can come out of the post-tax fund I’m using to live on for the rest of the year, cutting the life expectancy of that fund by two months. I don’t suppose that’s the end of the world…it’s just flicking frustrating.

And it will become a problem if I have to pony up another thousand bucks to get repairs done on the downtown house. That will cut a fund that was supposed to last for fourteen months to ten, maybe eleven months. And if I have to pay to have the ductwork and the roofing rebuilt…well, say goodbye to any hope of living off that money into 2011.

😯

Well! We’re live-blogging right along here…

The Mast AC guy is on the roof. He’s been banging around up there for the past 30 minutes as though there were were something to actually work on, and now he’s got the heat to come on. This should be entertaining.

I’ve canceled the doctor’s appointment and not been able to reschedule any time in the near future. It will be December before I can get in to see anyone, and by then maybe I’ll be dead. With any luck.

Computer crashed. Downloaded some updates. Fixed the computer for the nonce.

I still have no idea what the “logic exercise” for the English 101 class was supposed to be but will cannibalize one from the 102s. That will take an hour or so because I don’t have the answer key.

Holy mackerel! Now he’s got the unit blowing cold air and making a really weird noise.

🙄

He just tried to sell me a new capacitor for the damn thing!!!!!

I love it! I just love it!

When I pointed out that two different AC guys have been up there saying the thing was trashed by the hail, he said oh yeah—that, too!

So now he’s writing up an estimate for both an over-and-under unit and a high-efficiency side-by-side unit with the cost of rebuilding the ductwork thrown in.

😆

Here he is, back at the door: $6,100 for the over-and-under upon which I get no rebate, and $5,400 for the side-by-side that will blacken my skylight. However, he says they can adjust the ductwork so as to move the side-by-side away from the skylight. Interestingly, he doesn’t say what SEER this thing is; the feds won’t kick back the $1,500 for anything under 14 SEER.

He’s on his way down to M’hijito’s house, where he’s not to do any work on it other than the maintenance I’ve paid for.

😛

The “Logic Exercise” is something I put online weeks ago, for the little dollinks to do in class today. In the course of tracking this down, another little revelation arose, just this moment:

Blackboard somehow hid four papers whose authors submitted them right on time, on December 9. Not seeing them on Blackboard, I figured the students hadn’t turned them in and so gave each kid a 0 on that assignment. Soooo… Now, whoop de doop, I’ve got FOUR MORE mind-numbing papers to grade between now and 1:00 p.m.

It’s 10:50, I haven’t even had a minute to get a bite of breakfast or feed the dog since I got up at 6:30, and it’s time to get back to work.

Good-bye, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!

It Never Rains but It…HAILS?

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Hailstones
Half-melted hailstones

{sigh} I give up worrying about this stuff. What’s the point? Trying to get abreast of the money thing is like trying to exceed the speed of light: it violates a law of physics.

The AC guy was here for the seasonal maintenance visit. He says the recent hailstorm trashed the coils on the aged Goettl HVAC unit on the roof. Goettl went out of the manufacturing business several years ago, and so the parts are no  longer available. Therefore, says he, the unit will have to be replaced.

Cost? About $7,890.

Because the storm is regarded as a “natural disaster,” insurers are covering the damage without raising people’s rates (although you can be sure everyone in the state will see their premiums go up next year as a result of this). All very  nice…except that by way of saving some cash on the already phenomenal homeowner’s insurance premiums, I raised my deductible to $2,000.

This statement the guy gave me shows the $1,500 tax credit the government supposedly will pony up and suggests the power company may or may not rebate $250. Presumably The Hartford will deduct those amounts from whatever they’ll pay toward this thing. So…that hailstorm is going to cost me a minimum of two grand.

And you know it’s not gunna stop there.

The AC guy thinks there’s no roof damage, but The Hartford is sending a claims adjuster over to examine not only the HVAC unit but also the roofing. The deductible, I’m told, will only apply once if I have to also make a claim for the roof.

Meanwhile, no one has looked at the downtown house, which also was hailed mightily upon and also has a high deductible.

So much for any silly ideas I had about catching up financially, having a little breathing space, being able to pay the underwater mortgage’s premiums with my teaching salary. Damn!

I’ll have to dig into the very savings that were going to be used to stock my bank account with enough each month to pay the day-to-day bills. The money from my next three months’ salary will have to go to make that up. And that will not leave enough to cover the cost of next year’s mortgage payments out of the remainder of what I will earn by teaching in 2011.

LOL! Is there any question why my belly hurts and my blood pressure is high?

hail1

The law of physics?

You can’t win.