Angst

The late great dust storm left an astonishing mess. And nice timing: The day I bring home 150 student papers to grade (yes!), I get distracted by a good four hours of shoveling mud out of the pool, two trips to the pool shop to keep Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner staggering along (to the tune of $70), an hour of scraping dust up off the floors…my god.

I’m so tired I’m physically sick.

It’s 9:30, I have another 75 papers to read between now and 6:15 tomorrow morning, and I give UP. There’s just no way I’m going to get through all that stuff.

Decided to opt dusting the furniture (and the baseboards, and the walls, and the cabinetry, and the appliances, and the lampshades, and the fans, and…) in favor of microfiber-ragging up the tiles and vacuuming the garage floor, since they were gritty underfoot. There’s so much dust in the air, it will take several days for it to settle out. But settle it will: all over the furniture, the baseboards, the walls, the etc.

So much dirt is still hanging in the atmosphere that, as I was driving up to campus this morning, it was shrouding the hilltops like fog or low-flying clouds. But neither fog nor cloud is what this stuff is. If you linger outdoors, a layer of fine, scratchy grit settles on your skin. Work up a sweat (as I spent the entire afternoon doing), lick your lips, and along with the salt you get a mouthful of crunchy stuff.

So I figured it would be better to just wait until it all settles out than to clean and then have to clean again.

But the pool: that had to be dealt with. What a mess!

Looked like someone had dumped about half a wheelbarrow of dirt in there. Mud rippled across the bottom like sand at the seashore, dusted the walls, piled up in a dune at the deep end.

Started working at dawn, as soon as there was just enough light to grope around. So much dirt lay on the bottom that I didn’t see the wads of devil pods under there. Ran the pump long enough to skim off the floating debris; then pulled out the skimmer basket, dipped Harvey in the drink, and plugged him in.

Took about 10 minutes to bring him to a dead stop. And to push the filter’s pressure gauge to 22 psi.

Backwashed, recharged the filter. Pulled Harvey out and found he was gagging on devil pods and strappy leaves. Put him in the back of the car.

On the way home from the interminable classes, took him by Leslie’s. The manager discombobulated him, cleaned him out, replaced a gear box (which I doubt needed to be replaced…I don’t trust that guy), and charged me $70. Another unexpected, unaffordable little surprise bill.

Back at the house, attached the bonnet to the garden hose, sucked all the pods and other debris off the bottom, put a spray attachment on the hose and swept down the walls as best as I could, reattached the rejuvenated Harvey. He waddled s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y across the bottom, barely moving. Something wrong, but not having time to think about it, decided to let him run a few hours while I graded papers.

Read one batch. Looked back out there: Harvey is at another dead stop.

Haul him out of the pool, schlep him back to Leslie’s. Guy says there’s really nothing wrong with Harvey that another $90 repair wouldn’t fix. He says probably the filter is clogged and needs to be backwashed.

I say I’ve already backwashed this morning.

He says one of his customers had to backwash three times.

Shit.

I plod back to the house. PSI is only 12 pounds or so…about normal. The filter does not need to be backwashed.

So I attach the manual vacuum to the hose, after engaging in a lengthy fight with the in-line leaf catcher, one of the most annoying inventions known to pool-going humankind. Clog the vacuum hose. Get it working. Takes about an hour to vacuum the mud off the walls and floor.

By then, yes, the filter indeed is straining again.

Backwash thoroughly. Run and run and run the water into the alley until it finally starts to run clean.

By now I’ve drained the pool almost to the skimmer basket. When I go to pour some DE in there to recharge the filter, the pump starts to cavitate.

Shit, shit, shee-ut!

Abort, abort abort! Shut down the pump before it sucks too much air in. Drop the hose in the pool and let it run full-bore, about 45 minutes.

Fire up the pump again. Bleed off the air. It’s running OK…at 15 PSI.

Ducky.

This means that before long (as in probably less than a week) the Leslie’s service dude is gonna have to come out here and take the whole damn thing apart, haul the heavy filter out to the alley, deconstruct it, wash all the filter pads (illegally in the alley), put it all back together, and recharge it.

I just had that done a month ago. It costs $120. One shouldn’t have to do that kind of procedure more often than every six months to a year.

So now we have $120 + $70; that would be another $190 this month, on top of the various other unexpected nasty bills that are rolling in while I have no income.

All told, I’d say I worked about four hours cleaning the pool, starting at 4:30 a.m. An hour on the house. Four hours of standing in front of a classroom starting at 7:00 a.m. Ninety minutes or two hours driving back and forth and dickering with the Leslie’s store. And I didn’t keep track of the time spent reading the 75 papers I’ve managed to get through.

Ugh. Life in Paradise!

Well, the verdict on the car is it’s leaking oil from the head gasket (or something like that, which I’m not very clear about) in addition to needing a new timing belt. To keep it running is going to cost around $1,200 or $1,300.

Rather more than I’d like to spend on a car that’s well over 11 years old.

I have enough money in savings to buy a new vehicle, if I don’t go overboard. However, this just does not feel like the time to go out and drop fifteen or twenty grand on a car. On the other hand, with permanent unemployment a fact of life, no time is the time to go out and drop fifteen or twenty grand on a car.

On the third hand, I know the clunk is not going to run forever, and sooner or later I’m going to have to give up and buy a new car.

The issues are more complex than they seem on the surface:

Money

Before I was laid off, I had a Vanguard short-term corporate bond fund in which I’d saved more than enough for the next car purchase. That piggy-bank was raided when M’hijito and I bought the downtown house, which is now so deeply underwater that it looks like we never will get out from under it. Basically, everything we put into that house is gone, including a large chunk of the car-buying fund.

When GDU canned me, I consigned what remained of that money to my financial managers, who invested it intelligently. So, now that the market has revived a little, there’s just about enough to buy one more modestly priced car.

The Market

The stock market is on its way down. I really would like not to pull around $15,000 out of the market on the down-tick.

Taxes

However, the new accountant tells me that 2012 is the last chance I’ll get to withdraw that money without taking a tax wallop. The dividend tax will kick back in at the beginning of next year, and so if I want to use my savings to buy a car, I need to do it before the end of 2011.

The vehicle won’t run more than another few weeks without major repairs, and so I actually need to do this pretty quick, if I’m going to do it.

Insurance and Registration

I called The Hartford to see what buying a new car will do to my auto insurance bill. Add about $420 a year is what it’ll do.

To register a new car in Arizona costs $370. Although that amount dwindles as the car ages, it doesn’t drop fast enough to make the cost affordable, not for a very long time.

Right now I self-escrow enough from my monthly income to cover the annual insurance bill. However, the amount I set aside is not enough to cover the outrageous cost of new-car registration. The annual registration and emissions fees for an 11-year-old junker are so low I can pay them out of pocket; if I buy a new car, I’ll have to start self-escrowing enough to cover the new tax bill as well as the larger amount for insurance.

($420 + $370)/12 = $65.83 a month

I am just making ends meet on my piddly little scrabbled-together income. The truth is, I’m spending more than I earn almost every month, because every goddamn month some new unexpected expense comes up that causes me to go over budget. And “budget” = every after-tax penny that hits my bank account.

To save $66 a month on gas, I’d have to buy a Prius. The trade-in on the Dog Chariot is not enough to make it possible for me to afford a Prius. Nor am I even faintly interested in repeating my friends’ experience of having to pony up $3,000 for new batteries after five and a half years.

Thus I’m looking at something like a Hyundai Sonata, a Hyundai Elantra (too small for safety in this city, really, and uncomfortably low to the ground for an old lady to be climbing in and out of), or a Hyundai Tucson. The Sonata gets about 24 mpg in town; 35 on the highway. The Tucson, the Elantra, and Toyota’s RAV4 all get similar mileage: about 22/28. My car, in its decrepitude, registered 20 mpg on the last fill-up. IMHO the desired vehicles don’t do that much better than the Dog Chariot…certainly not enough better to save $66 a month on gas.

Honestly, I don’t know where an extra $66 a month is going to come from. Every time I cut expenses—which I just did, by shifting the cost of the DSL to the S-corporation, which pays for it with before-tax funds that cost me money to access otherwise—the cost of living goes up by just about the amount I save. Mostly it’s the cost of blindsiding, actually: the nasty little surprises never seem to stop, and they’re always worst when living costs are highest, during the summer months.

Jeez. I could not believe the $300 the damn Medicare would not cover. Did you realize Medicare does not cover what its bureaucrats regard as “preventive” care? So if you go in for a routine physical, most of the costs, except for some of the blood tests, are not covered? This means that you get to wait until you develop symptoms of, say, cardiac failure or diabetes, before you can have the treatment needed to prevent astronomically expensive medical costs, which of course Medicare will then have to pay. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well. Back to trying to make sense of the problem at hand. We have the issue of…

Timing

When I started out buying cars, I realized I couldn’t easily afford to make car payments out of cash flow. So I snowflaked and snowballed and hustled to pay off the loan on the Camry that I purchased a year or two after I divorced, and then I started saving money toward the next car. I actually saved enough in that short-term corporate bond fund to cover more than one car.

Then I got the thousand-dollar-a-day dog, who was given to sitting on the back seat of the Camry, sticking her nose between my head and the driver’s seat window, and shrieking into my ear. By the time I’d get out of the car, my ringing ears literally hurt.

To avoid losing my hearing (and throttling the dog), I decided to get a larger vehicle, which would position her further back from my head. The Camry was only about six years old at the time.

My son needed a functioning vehicle; he was driving a car his dad had gotten him in high school, and it was falling apart. So instead of trading in the Camry, I gave it to M’hijito.

This meant I used a large chunk of the car-buying fund for the Dog Chariot.

Before I did that, the car fund contained enough to buy not one but two cars. At the time I bought the Camry, I figured I could drive it for ten years, carrying me to 2004: age 59. The next car would then run until I was 69; the final car I could afford from that fund would run until I was almost 80. At that point, if I lived that long enough (there’s a good chance I won’t), it would be about time to quit driving. If by some miracle I was still living, the theory went, I would buy a second-hand car to run the two to five years left in my driving career.

When I gave the Camry to my son after six years of ownership, I torpedoed that plan.

What this means today is that if I buy a new car now, in 2011, it will be ready to crap out in 2021. I’ll only be 76 then: I should have another five to ten years of driving time left, assuming my health holds. But by then I won’t have any cash to spend on a new car, because I will have used it up on the car I buy this year.

So, in that light, it’s in my interest to keep the Tankmobile rolling for another five years. Chuck the Wondermechanic says it should run another 50,000 to 60,000 miles; since I put about 10,000 miles a year on a car, that would fill the bill.

Salesmen

I just dread going into a car dealership and getting sheared by some crook. And I know that’s exactly what’s going to happen. In the past, I’ve dealt with those people by proxy: through a car broker. He would apply his savvy and his male voice to extract a fair price from the Toyota sleazes, and I would not have to go through the “I’ll have to talk to my manager” torture.

The broker is retired now.

Costco and the credit union both have auto purchasing services. It’s unclear how much you save off the bottom line, but it looks like a take-it-or-leave it deal. The amount Costco claims is the price is about two grand more than Edmond publishes, so that smells a little funny. You have to go through their dealers, and you have to give up your phone number, which means you get on their phone list, which means you’ll never stop getting soliciting phone calls.

The Earthquake

Japanese vehicles are in short supply, a situation expected to last until the end of 2011 (at least). This means prices of Toyotas, Nissans, and the like—if you can even find one—are through the roof.

Hyundai is manufactured in Korea, although you can be sure that company has been using parts made in Japan. That factor and the increased demand for alternative Asian cars probably also will drive the price of the proposed Sonata, Elantra, or Tucson.

Where the Repair Money Would Come From

The cash to buy a new vehicle would come out of the new-car-buying fund, which presently resides in the stock market.

But the cash to pay for repairs will come out of my bank account, which, assuming I get a decent tax refund next April, holds  just about enough to delay my having to start a monthly drawdown from savings for about 18 months. At least, it did until the dental and medical bills came along. I think we’re down to about 16 months now. Another $1,300 bill will shave a month and a half off that, hastening that particular day of reckoning.

On the other hand, obviously drawing $15,000 out of savings to buy a car now does nothing to keep me from drawing money out savings. It may be better to take the money out of cash flow and let the future take care of itself.

But on that third hand, if I don’t take the money out of the market in 2012, I’ll end up paying dividend taxes on it, which could be around 20 percent. That will not leave enough to cover the cost of another car!

Aaaaaauughhhhhh!

I guess I could take the money out in December (by which time, if we’re lucky, the market may have recovered from its latest swoon), stash it in a CD, and let it sit there until the clunk falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay.

I don’t know. Well…yes, I do. It’s four in the morning. I’ve been up since 1:00 a.m., and it’s time to go back to bed.

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?

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!

!@#$%^&*!

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