Coffee heat rising

Angst

Financial Terrors: What’s your worst fear?

by
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

by

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.

Macy’s to Funny: Life Is Good

by

Well. The Macy’s misadventure turned out better than I imagined possible.

First crack out of the box this morning, I presented myself at the business office in the nearest Macy’s, which happens to inhabit the snooty Biltmore Fashion Square. I will say, I was primed for battle. But through a great effort of will, I determined that I would be…well, at least polite. After a brief search, I found a tall, silver-haired fellow secreted away in a windowless, crowded office way in the back of the third floor.

I explained the circumstances: Charge forgotten after no statements had arrived; bill sent to a collection agency with a Better Business Bureau grade of “F” because of its disastrous complaint record.

To my surprise, this gentleman turned out to be a mellow sort of a guy, the type who probably never gets visibly frustrated or annoyed, even when confronted by an eccentric old bat the first thing Monday morning. Better, as it developed, he was a man with a Rolodex full of direct lines to human beings. And, best of all, he was an area supervisor.

As he’s punching buttons to make his way through a phone-tree maze, he says, “You know, they’ll want a photo ID.” No problem: I produce my driver’s license, which gets added to the mound of paper now littering his desk—including the correspondence from the collection bureau. He gets someone on the phone; then proceeds to call someone else.

“What’s your address?” he asks.

“Nine ninety-nine Erewhon Road,” I say.

“Hm,” he says.

He gets off the phone from another factotum. Then he says, “Here’s what’s happened. They’ve been sending your statements to the wrong address.”

“What?”

“Yes. Look: the address this credit bureau has, which is the same address our credit department has, is on Erewhon Street, not Erewhon Road. Your driver’s license says you live on Erewhon Road.”

Oh. Em. Gee. My strange neighbor Manny lives at 999 Erewhon Street, two houses away from me. He’s been peeved at me ever since the roofers parked a load of asphalt shingles meant for my house on top of his roof.

It turns out that Manny and his wife have been marking misdelivered correspondence “refused” and returning it to the senders. Cute, huh? Considering that they walk their two dogs past my house to let them shit all over the yard about every third day, you’d think they could bestir themselves to carry a piece of first-class mail over and drop it in the mailbox.

Mr. Supervisor speculates that the reason the physical plastic credit card got delivered is that the post office will not return credit cards, so they probably took the time to look up my real address. As for the dunning letter from the collection bureau: that was raw luck. He thinks probably it fell into the hands of a postal carrier who happened to know the customers on his route, and who also could tell the difference between a road and a street.

Marshaling his vast collection of direct lines to actual human beings, Mr. Supervisor made a couple of calls and within five or ten minutes he had erased the black blot on my records and arranged for me to pay the bill right then and there, in person. Not only that, but he came up with a charge of $23, not $28.

Impressive, eh?

The take-away message here is to resolve issues in the corporate bureaucracy, avoid the punch-a-button maze whenever possible and seek a face-to-face meeting with a live human being.

What a relief! It felt a lot like the way you feel when you finally manage to dig a mean splinter out of your foot.

Much cheered, I decided to take a tour of the Biltmore shopping center, where I used to hang out pretty regularly, back in the palmy days when I could afford to shop in places like Ralph Lauren. Coveted a few iPhones and iPads and drooled on an iMac with a gigantic screen (actually, it’s almost affordable).

The new accountant says the S-corporation can and should be spending a few bucks on business-related items for its proprietor. No question it can afford a new iMac. She even thinks it should be paying for a cell phone (!!). I wonder if it could afford an iPhone.

Over to Williams-Sonoma, purveyor of so many of the now aging accouterments of my nifty little gourmet kitchen. Did I mention that during the past Week in Hell, I destroyed my favorite 8-inch sautée pan? Yesh. It’s pretty much wrecked.

Williams-Sonoma has one just like it, only in All-Clad instead of Cuisinart, the maker of the deceased gem of a fry-pan. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it…that one plus another All-Clad the size of the nonstick 10-inch Calphalon number that’s about worn out would come to around $225. Plus 9.3% tax. For a mere $90 (not counting almost ten bucks in tax), I could get two non-stick Calphalons in exactly the sizes I want. But they have that annoying brushed slate-colored stuff on the outside, which over time collects a patina of grease that will not come off. Oh, covet those shiny All-Clad things!

Frugal Scholar also covets All-Clad and, like me, picks them up at thrift stores and estate sales. And, she notes, at interesting cut-rate sites like this one. Yea, verily: there’s the beloved little pan! As an irregular, forty-two dollah! This outfit has more 10-inch pans than you can shake a stick at, but Williams-Sonoma’s, at $120, comes with a lid, which none of the online models do.

Moving on, I visited a few more of my old haunts and realized the place has changed hugely since the last time I idled away an hour or two there. I have got to get out of my garrett. The world is starting to pass me by.

That notwithstanding, I believe I’m going to permit a little passing by this afternoon. I’ve lost count of the number of evenings in a row when I’ve sat down to dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., after having parked myself in front of the computer somewhere between four and six in the morning. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well last night, with thoughts of some shady collection bureau haunting the night. The day is too beautiful to kill in the office.

The journalism students’ papers (both sets of them) are read, and a start has been made on the freshmen’s papers. The little McBoingers don’t have a major paper due for another two or three weeks, and so they can wait a few days to get their present magnum opus. So, I am knocking off the work for the rest of the day.

That decision having been taken on the way home, the minute I walked in the house the phone rang, and lo! There was a prospective client calling from Virginia, seeking a project manager. A project manager for big projects. Technical projects. That would be the sort done by professionals, not self-published tracts by some wretch who thinks the hoodoos in Sedona were put there by space aliens. Did I add paying projects to that?

So between now and tomorrow Tina (who when last heard from was talking about waiting table again) and I will need to organize something persuasive about ourselves and line up some live references. This is the sort of client that, if we can manage to do a decent job, could keep us in beer and skittles for quite a while.

Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona
Space alien artifacts

Images:

Macy’s in New York City. Mike Strand. Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
All-Clad 8-inch frying pan. Shamelessly ripped off the Internet
Cathedral Rock, Sedona. Tomas Castelazo. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Money Happens; So Do Fiascos

by

Lenten thanks, Day 21

Thank God for WordPress.com!

Two nice little checks for The Copyeditor’s Desk just came in: a payment from Google and a handsomer remittance from an editorial client. This brings the corporation’s bottom line to almost six grand, plenty to buy a new computer, which I’m going to have to do one of these days. When I tried the credit union’s new electronic deposit tool, it worked with no problem. So today I can deposit the cash that fell off those money trees without having to burn gas or time.

Time. Yes. We could all do with an infusion of that. One fiasco after another here: I’m working 18- to 20-hour days again, trying to cope with the avalanche of little disasters.

The misbegotten Blackboard has done it again. OMG, how I hate Blackboard; hate to the nth power! After half the world has upgraded to IE9 or Firefox 4, now IT sends out a notice that neither of these is compatible with Blackboard.

Actually, we might more accurately put it the other way around: Blackboard is incompatible with IE9 and Firefox 4.

Either way you look at it, it means a bunch of my students can’t get into my course sites unless they download Chrome or Safari. And one of those is a 100% online course!

I recently upgraded Firefox myself, but for reasons unknown, it only updated to 3.9, and so at least I can still get into the courses. If the upgrade prompt had installed 4.0, I would be screwed. The only way I could access the online course at all and manage the incoming papers from the face-to-face students would be to sit in the campus library, in a miasma of rhinoviruses floating on the air, for hour after hour after hour.

Well, no. Actually, I could get in with Safari, but it’s much less convenient. Compared to Firefox, Safari is a pain in the butt to use.

Yesterday I worked from three in the morning to after midnight, with a hiatus to stand in front of two f2f sections, creating new a website on WordPress.com to accommodate the online course. As some of you may recall, building the course in Blackboard took several months—indeed, the school paid me the equivalent of an entire course’s stipend to do that large amount of work. So, trying to move the course (and the two freshman comp sections) to a new platform in a matter of days is no joke.

I think, however, that it’s going to work.

The “Journalist” template will accommodate a lot of pages in the right sidebar. That’s good, because moving all the course materials over here involves posting 26 pages. That’s right. Twenty-six.

Below those, there are 15 sets of external links to sites ranging from examples of different article types to trade groups and job boards. The sidebar, in short, is toilet paper.

However, two students have said the material is more accessible than it is in Blackboard. That tells you something about Blackboard! 😉

The “subscribe” function will allow students to receive e-mail pings when new announcements go online, which BB doesn’t provide…well, actually, it does have an RSS function, but the District disabled it. Students have to proactively go TO their Blackboard site and physically scan up and down the front page looking for new posts. The straight, conventional blog format in WordPress allows new announcements to appear at the top of the page; if you post a “permanent” announcement in BB, it sticks to the top of the page and the weekly learning module updates get pushed below the fold, giving students the impression that no new announcements have come up.

Of course, WP lacks the assignment submission function and the grade sheet function. However, those are easily replaced. My plan is to set up a separate Gmail account dedicated exclusively to the online course, which will segregate student papers from the flood of spam that pours in from the community colleges. It will be easy to return graded student papers as “replies” to incoming Gmail. And as for their grades: a one-line spreadsheet with the functions built in will tell students what their current score is and show their percentage of total points. I’ll e-mail a blank spreadsheet to them and let them enter their own scores in their own little spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, two clients imagine I’m working on their stuff. One has an arcane problem with Word, which I may not be able to fix from my Mac.

Three sets of student papers are pouring in as we speak.

The Book Publisher’s Association thinks I’m going to mount their March newsletter, which is now three weeks late, in the arcane web publishing platform they use.

And the Carnival of Personal Finance is slated to go online here on Monday.

Another Day, Another Dollar…Another Few Dollars Lighter

by

Well, this has been quite the day.

The accursed virus that grabbed me by the throat worked itself up to a high pitch last night. Finally got to sleep little after 5:00 a.m.; the alarm jangled at 6:00 to start a day filled with chores that could not be evaded.

First, it was off to Scottsdale for a presentation to my business group’s 7:15 breakfast meeting. That went better than expected. I pitched the idea of buying ad space on Funny. People actually seemed to be interested, giving me some hope that this scheme could work. I think I’ll have to reach a wider audience of businessmen and women, though—possibly try to deliver the same pitch at the Chamber or other networking groups.

From there, it was down to the client’s office to drop off another set of edited page proofs. Back to my house to call the doctor’s office and then like a rocket to the campus.

Adjunct faculty get no sick leave. If you’re not there, your pay is docked; that you’re pounding on death’s door is beside the point. Because all my face-to-face classes meet on the same days—Tuesdays and Thursdays—if I canceled classes today I would lose one fourth of my pay this period!

Obviously, I can’t afford to have my paycheck cut by 25 percent. So I dragged out there and laid some busywork on the kiddies, sending them to the library to kill time. This left two hours until the second class, allowing me to drive home and try to sleep a little. Naturally this was mooted when the doctor’s nurse called me back. I had to explain that I am not going to make a two-hour round-trip drive to the Mayo only to be told that yes, I have a cold. She was able to figure that out over the phone, and said they’d call a prescription in to the Safeway pharmacy.

Back to campus; deliver the same message to the second section; shovel them out the door. Flee!

Flat out of food for Cassie; last night I cooked her a piece of steak. That not being a viable proposition for the long term, I had to drive by the Costco to pick up one of their roast chickens, which will last her a week and give me something to eat, too.

It’s 10.8 miles from the Costco near campus to the Safeway nearest to my house. Needless to say, every light turned red as I drove up to it, all the way from the campus to the Costco and from the Costco to the Safeway…just as every light had turned red while I was traipsing from the west side of Phoenix to uptown Scottsdale to downtown Scottsdale and back, about 15 miles each way.

Arrived at the Safeway, stood in line (enduring the dirty looks of fellow customers as I hacked and coughed), only to learn that they never heard of me. The doctor’s office had never phoned in. Pharmacist said she would call if and when the prescription was called in. I said I was not dragging back over there this afternoon, because it is unsafe for me to be behind the wheel of an automobile.

Jayzus! In the state I’m in, it’s a miracle I didn’t kill someone. On the other hand, given the number of morons who wove back and forth in front of me and beside me while they yakked on their phones, maybe one could say it’s too bad I didn’t kill one of them.

Moving on… I picked up a pint of berry sherbet, figuring to anaesthetize my tonsils by freezing them. It worked, too. Briefly.

Late this afternoon, the doctor’s nurse said he had called in a prescription for Flonase. A day late and a dollar short, sister!

My car is now down a quarter-tank of gas. That puts the eefus on my gasoline budget. There’s no way I can run that boat from now until the end of the current billing cycle—April 21—on just one more fill-up. The three-quarters of a tank I had to buy on Monday cost $53, more than half the monthly budget.

Interesting how even a minor ailment drains your pocketbook, isn’t it? If I hadn’t forced myself to put in an appearance on the campus—done at some risk to life and limb, since I really should not have been driving—I would have lost about $120. The pharmacist suggested that I try the syrup form of Mucinex DM, which she thinks gets into some people’s systems more efficiently. So now I have two bottles of the generic form of that (rather useless!) stuff, one full of horse-pills and one full of cherry syrup. I wouldn’t have bought the sherbet if my throat didn’t feel like someone stuck a blowtorch down it. The extra round trip between campus and home plus the unplanned trip to the Safeway guaranteed that I’ll have to spend more than $100 on gas this month.

As a practical  matter, the common cold costs the U.S. economy big-time. In 2003, a University of Michigan study alleged that the combined annual cost of all our colds is around $40 billion a year, “substantially more than other conditions such as asthma, heart failure and emphysema.” As a group, we Americans were spending $2.9 billion annually on OTC nostrums and another $400 million on prescription drugs for symptomatic relief, and wasting $1.1 billion on antibiotics, which have no effect on viral illnesses like colds.

I haven’t bought the prescription yet and may not. Its common side effects include dizziness, headache, nasal irritation or burning, nausea, nosebleed, sore throat, and vomiting. The only one of those I don’t already have is throwing up, and I don’t think I need it, either. So that’ll be a few bucks saved.

What gets into doctors? Do they not have access to the Internet? How hard is it to type “Flonase side effects” into a search engine? For that matter, how hard is it to read the manufacturer’s notice, posted prominently online: “you should know that fluticasone [i.e., Flonase] may decrease your ability to fight infection”? The stuff is indicated for allergic rhinitis, not colds, a condition that itself comes under the heading of “infection.”

Anyway, between the schlepping around and the expenditures on OTC drugs and the potential cost of a contraindicated prescription drug, I’ve probably spent as much as I saved by forcing myself to traipse to the campus through a rhinovirus haze.

More to Come…

by

Lenten thank, Day 12

Thank God I don’t still live in Saudi Arabia!

My mother, who was a low-key enthusiast of Edgar Cayce and things mystical, used to say the Apocalypse would come from the Middle East. She used to say a lot of things…but why not? It’s gotta come from someplace, after all.

We’re now engaged in another war in another Middle Eastern country, where we’ve been at war longer than we were during World War II. The entire region is erupting, a development which does not bode well.

IMHO, if we don’t free the West from dependence on Arab oil, we will see something very like an apocalypse, because that is what the collapse of a dependable, cheap energy supply will do to our economy. Someone else once said it better: a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

But…maybe it’s just the mean virus speaking. It was a long, dark night.

Now I have to run to teach two classes—mercifully, they’ll be parked in front of computers today. By the end of the day, though, a lovely guest post should be ready to mount. Meanwhile, don’t take any wooden nickels!

Betcha didn't think there was such a thing, didja?

Image: ColWilliam. Public Domain.