Coffee heat rising

Angst

Done for…well…for the time being

by

Incommumicada…not by choice. Sick as a dawg…not the flu (i guess…), but something surprisingly like it. Paypal chooses this moment to give me the shaft. Looks like my business is about to die. Dig and shovel and shovel and dig and come up, at great interminable expensive and painful hassle, with a possible workaround. Depends on the Asian clientele: if they can and if they are willing to wire me money instead of sending by PayPal, maybe I can stay in business. If not: time to take forklift driving lessons.

More jobs in-house. No idea whether clients can pay for them. Already had to write off $107 & change. Don’t know how to cope with it.

Subcontractor wants to be paid in cash dollars. This is an alien medium. Sort of like asking me to pay in beads made from whelk shells. Devolves into major hassle. Major hassle: I do not need it when I am sick as a dawg, when Paypal is screwing me and my clients, when I’m having to create a new account with an international bank, when I do not even know if my several dozen other clients can or will go along with this.

Going back to bed. A thousand curses upon this effing over-teched world. Seeking training in how to become a forklift operator.

El Gobierno Quiere Ayudarte…

by

El gobierno quiere ayudarte… The government wants to help you! HOW, after all, would we ever get by without being made to traipse back out to the car from the pharmacy counter to retrieve still MORE identification so we can buy a package of nasal decongestant? This means, after standing in line behind three customers, I have to trudge outside, dodge the panhandlers, trudge back inside, and stand behind three more customers.

Y’know what I think?

O’course you do, but lest we somehow miss the point: Dammit! If you want to convert a box of Sudafed into meth and snort it up your goddamn nose, you DESERVE WHAT YOU GET. And if you’re stupid enough to buy meth from a drug dealer who has distilled the junk from a boxful of Sudafed, YOU EFFIN’ DESERVE WHAT YOU GET.

Let them eat fuckin’ cake!

Okay, okay, let’s admit it: weirdly enough, I did have some fun traipsing in and out and in and out of the Albertson’s.

First, on the way back in, I pass the BIGGEST, yea verily THE BADDEST, most MASSIVE dude you have ever seen in your entire life, marching out of the store with a bouquet of flowers in his paw.

Awwwww…soooo adorable! And, alas, born 30 years too late.

Moving on, I rejoin the pharmacy line, where I fall in behind an Old Dude. He’s loafing in an electric scooter which, as it develops, he doesn’t really need. But in his old age, he has discovered which side his butter’s breaded on. He and I chat about the joys of retirement, which allow us to not give a damn whether we’re first in line. He says he loves to go fishin’. I ask where he likes to fish. He names a park pond over in Po’ Folk Country, where if you fork over a fee for an “urban fishing license” (don’t ask, goddammit: el gobierno quiere nothing more than ayudarte!) you can catch catfish, a creature he finds delectable. And you know he comes from your father’s social class, which causes you at once to love him and to fear him. 😀

The guy behind the counter, also born about 30 years too late, is another of the cutest things you’ve ever seen.

It takes this lovely creature a good 10 minutes of farting around, filling out online forms and more online forms and MORE online forms to sell you ONE BOX of menacing nasal decongestant. This is OK, because of course it provides you just that much more time to admire his adorableness.

How can you possibly be annoyed when you get to absorb this much cuteness and adorableness from an array of random males?

Well, of course, you can’t.

You CAN be annoyed, however, when you get home and find you can’t break into the mini-Fort Knoxes with which El Gobierno arranges to protect you and your brainless children from yourselves. It damn near takes a chain saw to break the lid off the squirt bottle of nasal decongestant, and putting the Sudafed knockoff away in such a form that you can get at it in the middle of the night without driving yourself into a flying rage breaks your fingernails and requires you to find a jar with a lid and a blank label in your garage junk collection.

So yes. Yes, you are pissed by the time you get these medicaments into your house and into a state that allows you to use them without rage-inducing hassle when you will need to use them.

Porque el gobierno quiere ayudarte. By golly!

Comedy of Errors…That Ends Well

by

What a wacky day! Bill Shakespeare himself couldn’t have made this one up.

So my friends VickyC and KJG made plans to meet at KJG’s new digs in Payson, on the 9th. This entails a junket up the side of the Mogollon Rim, about a 90-minute drive.

But first, I had to find some place to farm out the dog: My son’s house.

M’hijito was pressed into duty.

From his house I would have to make my way through gawdawful rush-hour traffic, made even more nightmarish by the TWO (not one) no-left-turn-during-rush-hour roads between my house and VickyC’s house. Getting there would require some driverly gymnastics on the master level. Meanwhile my back still hurts like hell.

So I arrive at his house at the duly appointed time, a little after 8 a.m. Jangle the doorbell.

He, given a fair amount of seniority on the job, is allowed to work at home to some degree. At a little after 8 a.m., he’s on the phone to a customer and is mightily annoyed at being interrupted.

Says he: It’s tomorrow, not today! The 9th is tomorrow.

WTF? Well, I’m sure the Big Day is Friday, because Vicky C, also gifted with a fair amount of seniority, often gets Fridays off. But now am confused.

Leave the dog with him, dart back to the car, and set out to circumnavigate the gawdawful no-left-turn lanes. This entails, in classic Phoenix driving fashion, traveling west in order to go east. I have to get over to 15th Avenue, cruise down to Indian School, fight my way across Central Avenue and the fucking train tracks, then veer south on 3rd Street, bat down to Palm Lane, cross 7th Street on that neighborhood lane (which has a light on 7th), and if I’ve lived that long make my way over a couple more neighborhood streets to VickyC’s.

This would be enough fun without the usual array of moron drivers.

But yea, verily: today I encounter the Emperor of Morons.

Wouldntcha know?

Southbound on 15th — a two-lane road, one southbound, one northbound, with a woozly little left-turn lane running up the middle — I pull up behind a jerk who’s meandering along at 15 mph. It’s a 35 mph zone, which means in Phoenix most people would drive 40 mph. Fifteenth Avenue is a main drag, you understand.

The turkey putters along and putters along. He’s not looking for someplace to turn. No. He’s just holding up the traffic.

Enough. I look around for a cop. Seeing none, I swerve into the left-turn lane and floor it!

This would be why we insist on a SIX-banger.

Sail past the moron and shoot back into the southbound lane, leaving the clown in the dust. Make the light and swing onto Indian School, where I wait through four or five lights to cross Central Avenue, pointlessly and stupidly congested by the lightrail boondoggle.

Finally get through that mess. Dart down 3rd, putter across Palm, and cruise up to VickyC’s house.

Naturally, she’s not there. Evidently my son is right: the Payson day was tomorrow. Which makes sense: the 9th is tomorrow, this being the 8th.

Back to the kid’s house. Pick up the dog, disappointing poor Charley the Golden Retriever, who was thrilled to have company today.

On the way home, stop by the park. By now, summat after 9:00 a.m., the morning is gorgeous! The air is still so crisp some frost lingers on the grass, but the sun is brightly shining. At this late hour, there’s almost no one in the park. We get in a mile’s walk, swinging south through a peninsula of Lower Richistan. Where…of course…

…we encounter another moron.

This is the Ohhhh don’t worry he only wants to play! species of moron.

Yes. Said chucklehead has a hundred-pound Rottweiller straining at a flimsy retractable(!) leash. This critter sees little Ruby and decides she’s at best a nuisance; at worse possibly a threat. The moron does not understand dog language, nary a whisper of it, and so he fails to grasp the meaning of a stiff-legged stance and a tense expression. Yea, verily, the stiff-legged stance with which his little FooFoo is approaching me and my dog, while he — the chucklehead — is being dragged along and cooing, he just wants to play!

I growl, perhaps altogether too unkindly, Right! I’ve heard the wind blow before. Poor little moron chuckles, probably nonplussed, and manages to hold his animal at bay until Ruby and I can get past, giving him and his poochie a wide berth.

Why? Why? WHY ARE SOOOOO MANY PEOPLE SOOO STUMP-STUPID?????

And speaking of stump-stupid, when I get back to the house I email VickyC to say I had the day wrong and I guess we’re going up to Payson on the 9th, Saturday, not on our usual get-together day, Friday.

She emails back: I thought it was March 9.

Holy sh!t.

We check in with KJG and learn forthwith that she’s on her way down here for a grandchild’s birthday, and indeed was figuring on March 9.

So. This is senility for ya. On steroids.

Actually, it’s a bit of a blessing. Quite a bit of a blessing.

First, of course, because I did not look forward to having to roll out of the sack early again tomorrow, bang around to feed me and the dog and pack the dog and her dinner in the car and repeat today’s adventures in city driving. So, hallelujah brothers and sisters, I’m excused from a repeat of that task.

But FAR more to the point: Our redoubtable new choir director, by way of orchestrating a special concert for this weekend’s Evensong, has arranged for a high-powered guest conductor to come in and lead us through this event. Out of the blue, he announced that said conductor would be here for a rehearsal tomorrow and, though notice was short, he would love to have as many of us attend as possible.

Well. Of course you may be sure I really wanted to be there, because our guy has brought in some very interesting people and this one promises to be another of them. Thinking I couldn’t possibly get out of the Payson junket, I was pretty disappointed.

But nay verily! Now I can go to this event after all!

So it goes: All’s well that ends well.

American Retirement: Be scared, be VERY scared???

by

So, as on cue, we get another nervous-making rant to the effect that ô God! dear God! Americans are JUST NOT SAVING ENOUGH for their dotage. If you look at NerdWallet’s latest terrifying reprise of Americans’ average 401(k) balance, by age, you’ll be ready to shoot yourself so as to will your savings to your adult kids before you use the money all up. Yea, verily: if you have a kid between 20 and 29 who manages the average savings level, the brat has  set aside only $11,600; but the median for that bracket is a piddling $4,000. If your kids have stumbled into their 40s without undue catastrophe, they’ll have stashed all of $106,200 on average (maybe three years’ worth of living expenses, if they’re lucky), rather more than the median figure of $36,900. And if you — not your kid — have accrued the average US savings for your age bracket, at 65 you have a grandiose $198,6700, but the median among your contemporaries is an even more spectacularly inadequate $63,000.

Horrors. Clearly we’re DOOOOOMED.

Why do I doubt it?

Well, here’s why. A 401K does not one’s only retirement instrument make.

In fact, Americans have a variety of devices that help them prepare for retirement. Not the least is real estate: paying down that mortgage.

Once you’ve paid off a mortgage, your house effectively returns to you the amount you were paying monthly toward the mortgage. It gives you that much money that you don’t have to pay out to keep the roof over your head. So, let’s say (for simplicity’s sake), you pay off your mortgage on your 65th birthday; your payments were $1,000 a month. From then on, that house represents $1,000 a month of retirement savings for you: $12,000 a year that you don’t have to earn and you don’t have to take out of your IRAs or 401(k). If you live to, say, age 85, it returns 12 months x 20 x $1,000: $240,000.

So, let’s say sure, you only have $106,200 in your 401(k). But with that plus the return on your paid-off house, you have the equivalent of $346,200 to live on. Not awesome. But not bad.

Okay, now let’s bear in mind that the 401(k) is not the only savings instrument you might have. For example, some of us know about Roth IRAs. In many ways, it’s better to pay taxes upfront and then stash the balance in a Roth than it is to use a 401(k) and bet that you won’t be earning enough in your dotage to put you in the taxman’s headlights. Lemme tellya from experience: It ain’t necessarily so that you’ll be free of income tax in your poverty-stricken old age.

Uncle Sam requires you to take a percentage of your 401(k) in each year of retirement, forcing you to choke up a chunk of taxes. If you’re not earning any more than Social Security and an annual savings drawdown, that tax bite can be a hardship.

If at the age of 45 you started racking up post-tax savings in a Roth IRA at the maximum amount allowed per year, presently $6,000, in 20 years you would have $120,000. Now let’s continue to assume you pay off the mortgage on your 65th birthday, meaning it starts to “return” the equivalent of the monthly payment, about $240,000 over the next 20 years. At 65, then, you have the practical equivalent of $120,000 + $240,000: that is, $360,000. Now let’s add up the average 65-year-old’s savings: we get $120,000 (Roth IRA) + $240,000 (amount you don’t have to earn to stay in your paid-off home) + $106,200 (average agèd American’s 401(k) savings): $466,200.

Not so bad. But now you not only have the roof over your head more or less free (except for taxes and maintenance), but the house also represents a monetary asset. You can sell it, or you can borrow against it. Let’s say it’s worth $188,900, the median home value of a U.S. house: that gives you a pre-Social Security retirement net worth of $655,100. If we take as the house’s value the average third-quarter 2018 sales price ($390,200), we come up with $866,400. That’s before Social Security income.

So. Yeah: it would be good if you maxed out your 401(k). But its balance doesn’t tell the whole story.

The whole story is represented by the total of all your assets, your Social Security, and the extent to which a paid-off house reduces the amount of cash flow you need to live adequately.

Pests and Nuisances, Oh My! :-D

by

Okay, so here’s something to amuse yourself…and all of us, should you wish to share: How many Pests and Nuisances rate as true pet peeves in your life? Because I’m a crabby old lady, I can count up quite a few. But it may be that normal people take a more equanimous view of Life, the Universe, and All That.

This reverie was spurred by a kindly ninny who elicited one of my favorite pet peeves: good-hearted souls who think God smiles on them when they cede their own right-of-way to people who do not want to invade their right of way and who just wish they would get going and get the hell out of the way. Yesterday Ruby the Corgi and I were headed out of Richistan across Main Feeder Street NW. Cars, as usual, were coursing up and down Main Feeder. We stopped at the corner, safely on the sidewalk, to allow all the motorists to pass. We were next to a stop sign on Richistan Way; there’s no stop sign on Main Feeder Street. This, as you  must know if you’ve ever driven a vehicle, means that motorists on Main Feeder have the right of way.

This woman comes along. She wants to turn right onto Richistan Way and then hang an immediate left onto the frontage road that runs parallel to Main Feeder. This is obvious. It is not disturbing in any way. It is a perfectly commonplace and benign maneuver. Ruby and I wait for her to make her turn.

But no. She stops in the middle of Main Feeder and waves her paw at us, demanding that I cross in front of her.

Dayum, but I hate that.

Look: When you have the right of way, you have the right of way. Do not wave people across the goddamn road in front of you when you have the right of way!!!!!!

Why? Is it not a good and Christian thing to do, to give others a break?

No. It is not. This is why:

When you fail to take the right of way that by law and custom are yours, no one knows what you are going to do. If I cross in front of you because you’re waving at me to go even though it’s your turn to go, and then you or someone else hits me, you idiot, that is taken not as your dumb fault but as mine!

I speak from experience.

My son was just out of infancy and riding in a car seat when I drove down to the airport to pick up his father, who traveled quite a lot. At the time, Sky Harbor had two one-way ring roads, one leading to the airport toward the east and a parallel one leading out of it toward the west. Each had two lanes. We needed to get across the eastward-bound road to get into the west-running lanes. The east-bound lanes were jammed. We sat at a stop sign for a few minutes, waiting for a break in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Suddenly a guy in the lane closest to us stopped, held up all the traffic behind him, and waved at me to proceed.

Still young and stupid, I didn’t know any better so presumed he knew it was safe to go. It was not. A car coming up beside him slammed into my car, causing quite the commotion.

Fortunately our baby was not injured. I was mad as a cat but shortly realized that was stupid: I should have known better than to trust a moron behind another steering wheel.

Don’t do that. If you have the right of way, take it and don’t make a nuisance of yourself.

In that same department, how about the nitwits that drive into your blind spot and stick there? Yeah: I had one of those today. He cruises up beside me in the left-hand lane, bearing north on Central Avenue, and parks there. Luckily I was able to see the clown in my side mirror — he was not visible in my rear-view mirror, as the ridiculous Venza has more blind spots than visible space.

If I sped up, he sped up to keep pace. If I slowed down, he slowed down. So, with no one behind me in either lane, I hit my brakes, damn near stopped before he grasped what was up, and swerved in behind the bastard. Defeated, he continued on down the road at a normal rate of speed.

A thousand curses upon his offspring and all their spawn!

And how about the air-headed women who effing bathe in heavy perfume? Ya know, laydeez (and gents): a little dab’ll do ya!

This afternoon I encountered not one but two of them in the AJ’s parking lot…just walking from the car to the door. No doubt their perfume was expensive and wonderful and sexy and seductive. But a) I have exactly zero desire to be seduced by some strange woman (or, oddly enough, by any woman); and b) one person’s expensive and wonderful is the next person’s pyuiieee!

Each of these women, who came along separately and appeared not to know each other, emanated a fog of perfume — in the middle of the damn workday! — that was enough to suffocate a vulture.

Don’t do that, please. And forgodsake don’t do it when you’re going to the office!

Then there are the nitwits who walk and text, proceeding across a parking lot or up a sidewalk utterly oblivious of where they’re going or who they’re about to run into. Encountered two of those in the AJ’s parking lot this morning, one as I was walking toward the store and one as I was walking out. The first numbskull was so enthralled with whatever was on her phone, she damn near walked into me. Only reason she didn’t was that I stepped aside before we collided.

Water-“saving” plumbing that doesn’t work. Is there any greater water-waster than this junk? The kitchen faucet that takes half your lifetime to fill a pot…hence, you go off to do some other small task rather than stand there and watch water dribble into the pan, so that by the time you get back, the pan is overflowing. That’s real ecological. The accursed toilets that supposedly take a third of the water needed by a real toilet to flush: meaning you have to flush three times to get everything down.

Yesterday the toilet plugged up. Nothing out of the ordinary had been flushed down there, and I just had the entire system roto-rooted a couple weeks ago, at great expense. Called the plumber. He didn’t call back until after 7 p.m. By then whatever was down there had dissolved, having sat in the pipe for hour after hour after hour, and along about mid-afternoon I’d managed to flush it down without overflowing the bathroom. God, but I hate those damn toilets!

See, one of the things I figured would happen when the climate-deniers took over the White House and the Congress was that maybe we’d get functioning plumbing and real light bulbs back. That would have been one good thing the Republicans could have accomplished. But ohhh no! They have to spend their energy on a hate campaign, and twitching around with a ridiculous clown in the Presidency. Ah: yes, there’s another pet peeve: the politics of the day. What a circus. If they’d given us back real light bulbs and working plumbing, we might have found some way to justify their existence. But noooo.

Speaking of gadgets, we have phones that require batteries to keep running. Jeez. One of my handsets apparently needs a new battery. This used to be an easy problem to solve: take it right up to the Radio Shack around the corner, where the clerk would kindly produce a new battery and prize the phone apart to install the thing. Now I’ll have to traipse across the city to a special store that sells batteries and try, as sweetly as I can manage, to persuade the sales staff to fix the damn phone for me. Good luck with that. If this scheme doesn’t work, I’ll have to buy a whole new set of phones, requiring all new programming and all new coordination of six handsets. Ugh.

A-n-n-d one last shot: the ubiquity of vast, privacy-invading monopolies that have taken over almost every aspect of our lives. They’ve done it so inexorably, so ingratiatingly, and so subtly that most of us aren’t even aware of how dependent we personally — and our entire culture — have become on organizations that are not are friends and not in our service. Take a look at what is happening as one tech writer tries to disconnect from five gigantic electronic entities…and consider the implications of what she discovered when she did.

And you? What are your pet peeves?

 

Discoveries: A couple of life lessons learned

by

Yesterday my agèd friends who just moved into the Barbizon Plaza the Beatitudes, a very fancy life-care community where business is booming, invited me join them at the institute’s fanciest dining room (it has three!) for lunch/dinner. The Beatitudes, in its current incarnation, is very nice indeed: much like living in a first-class hotel or on the Queen Mary.

(Yes, I once did cross the Atlantic on the Queen Mary. That ship personified luxury accommodation.)

And in that visit, I gained several valuable insights.

First off, after much worried clucking about how far the eateries are from their apartment (in their 90s, they both have their share of infirmities), they both said — out of the blue — that after having to walk around for just a few days, they’re each feeling a lot better. J. said her back and joints are actually improving, and she’s experiencing noticeably less pain. L. said he also was feeling, overall, better than he had in a long time.

So (said she, while loafing in front of her computer): those daily walks are not an option! If you want to feel as well as you can feel, get off your duff and walk around the neighborhood. Or the park. Or the indoor mall, if that’s what it takes. Apparently, the more you move, the longer you’re likely to keep moving.

Next: as to the long-term care insurance conundrum:  A lady came up and said hello to us, then disappeared into the scenery. In passing, my friends remarked that she had not bought into that place…that she rented an apartment instead.

Whoa! Hold the phone. That puts a whole new complexion on the long-term care insurance issue. Now that they mentioned it, I recalled that my father once rented an apartment at an old-folkerie associated with a nearby hospital (it’s quite a story…one day I’ll have to write it up for your delectation!). And it was possible to rent an apartment at the old-folkerie where he had used the entire proceeds of the sale of his home to buy in, though at his LTC commnity  renting was a short-term arrangement.

If you could live at the Beatitudes, on a long-term basis, as a renter rather than as a member of their buy-in “community,” and if renting there would give you dibs on a bed in their nursing home, then it might make sense to keep up the LTC insurance. Here’s why:

If you’re living in one of those life-care communities, you’ve got access to its nursing home (in these parts, a VERY big deal, because decent nursing homes are few and far between here). You’ve got twice-monthly housecleaning. You’ve got daily access to prepared meals as part of the deal. You’ve got a secure environment that’s safe and free from bums and burglars. You’ve got a whole staff keeping an eye on you and likely to notice when you don’t show up because you fell in the shower and broke your hip. You’ve got staff who fix things that break.

But these outfits charge a huge entry fee, basically about what you would clear on sale of an upper-middle-class home. That entry fee effectively serves as nursing-home insurance: by getting you into the life-care community, it pays for access to the institution’s on-campus nursing home: if and when you need it, for however long you need it.

But what if they let you just live there as a renter, with no pre-paid nursing home care? (Pre-paid, we might say, on the come….)

If you did not have to fork over your entire damn life savings to put a roof over your head with guaranteed access to competent nursing care — if instead you could be pretty sure you would end up in a specific nursing home for a period that could range from a number of days to a number of years, as long as you paid for it as needed —  then it would make sense to keep the MetLife LTC policy.

It would, of course, depend on what the institute charges for rent. And whether it gives renters the same preferential access to its nursing home that it gives to residents who give them a giant buy-in fee. (These outfits generally guarantee residents access to the on-campus nursing home or, if the place is full when you need it, to a nursing home of comparable quality.)

For people who buy in, in addition to its stiff entry fee the Beatitudes charges around $3000 a month per person. Together, these charges act as de-facto nursing home insurance. The money buys you a bed in the nursing home should you need it, without an increase in your monthly ding. Of course…if you never need it, then that’s money down the drain. If you do need it, the arrangement could in fact save your heirs most of their inheritance.

But if you could rent to live there, without having to cough up a buy-in fee, it would make sense to keep the nursing-home insurance — that is, assuming a rental agreement includes access to the on-campus nursing home. The Beatitudes supposedly charges people who live in the wild something in the range of $10,000 a month for nursing-home care. This would quickly drain your assets.

It costs me $2,000 a month to live in my home, and I don’t get anyone else cooking my meals. Another thousand bucks to feed me, clean the house, change the sheets, and guarantee availability of nursing care is within reason, more or less….but only if I don’t have to give up whatever I would make on the sale of my home! If renting made that possible, with the understanding that I’d have to pay out of pocket for any nursing home care required, then…

a) Living there would be do-able; and
b) It would make sense to keep the MetLife LTC insurance, because $130 a month, even if I live into my 90s, is one hell of a lot less than the $350,000± that I’d have to fork over from sale of my house.

I’d really like this house go to my son so that he can either sell it and bank the proceeds, rent it out to generate some cash flow, or move into it if he pleases. That means I do not want to have to sell it and spend the proceeds to get myself into an old-folkerie when I can no longer manage the place. Next week I’ll call over there and arrange to listen to their sales pitch. And be sure to ask them whether you really can rent without having to buy in, and if so, what you get for the rent.