Coffee heat rising

Frugality

Yard Sale, II

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VickyC ended up clearing about $700 on the Big Yard Sale Adventure. We held the sale open again yesterday (Saturday) from about 7:00 a.m. to around 3:00 p.m., and she sold a great deal of Stuff.

We also ended up having a lot more fun yesterday, because we met a whole bunch of interesting people. On Saturday folks have time to stop and chat.

yardsaleThe sorta-gentrifying neighborhood of shotgun houses and 1920s bungalows where VickyC lives is extremely diverse, populated not only by wanna-be Yuppies, penniless now but one day to be affluent, but also by many Mexican immigrants who communicate through their English-speaking young children. A Sikh temple is a-building down the street, and so quite a few Sikhs live in the neighborhood—an interesting and friendly set. Then, for reasons unknown, a LOT of urban Indians dwell in the area, most of them Navajo or at least identifying with the Navajo nation. A number of impoverished artists also live nearby. All of these people love to shop in yard sales.

An appealing teenaged boy came by in his Sikh robes, two dollars to his name. He bought a few things and coveted—ooohhh how he coveted!—the bass guitar and huge amp that VickyC’s boyfriend had contributed to the event. Of course, the $550 asking price was out of the question. He left his phone number and asked VickyC to ask the boyfriend to call to discuss. This, as it developed, was serendipitous.

The young parents from across the street dropped by with their 15-month-old baby. Dad is fully engaged in neighborhood politics. He stopped to discuss his scheme to create a newsletter that he hoped would be free of the acrimony that has developed over the years as the result of resistance to an old-timer who wants everything his way (so we were told). In the course of a long conversation, we learned a lot about the neighborhood activists, the demographics, and the City’s machinations for and against the large area included in the neighborhood association’s territory.

canyondechellyA Navajo couple dropped by with their young teenaged daughter. They, to tell the truth, were slumming, Sunday driving on a Saturday afternoon by yard-saling through a part of the urb that they considered shaky enough to be dangerous.They lived in Chandler, where they had set up household so they could send their kids through good public schools, in the absence of the same on the Res. Very mainstream middle-class in appearance, they attributed the quality of the school system and the paucity of commerce on the Res to the entanglements of many overlapping layers of government bureaucracy and observed that both of their children were doing exceptionally well in the Chandler schools. They did, however, say they probably will retire to the Res after the kids grow up.

The high point of the day was a 40ish Navajo woman who befriended us with a great deal of chatter and much shopping. She loved VickyC’s mom’s taste in clothes, and she selected about $60 worth of stuff (at a buck apiece). In the course of time, she told us a great deal about herself and her life, talking much more than one expects from Southwestern Native Americans, who tend to be quiet people. It seemed to me that something was not quite right, and eventually she revealed what it was: shortly after she had lost a five-week-old baby, she had fallen out of a moving pickup on the Res and sustained a near-fatal head injury. She survived by dint of brain surgery in a New Mexico hospital (where she had to be airlifted), but it took a year of therapy before she could speak normally and walk. She was very affable and explained to us how she would ceremonially free the clothing of the dead woman from the spirit that might remain and return her (the spirit) to her home at VickyC’s. Eventually she walked home and then returned with some ceremonial items that VickyC could use to assist with this process; she explained how to use them and what all those customs meant, she said, “in your way.”

She waited around most of the day for her husband, who was junketing with his workers, to arrive with some cash. During this time, she folded clothes and kept us company. As one might expect, he was less than thrilled with the plan to fork over $60 or $70 for used valuables. VickyC dropped the price for the mountain of clothing she’d selected to $20 and he relented.

By this time, it was getting late. VickyC announced she was closing the show and started dragging stuff out to the curb, where she intended to leave it for free. When hubby heard this, his enthusiasm rose. Now he started to make his own selections of used valuables, among which, to VickyC’s delight, was an oak entertainment center she had not unloaded. A Mexican woman was also there when the “FREE” announcement came down. She loaded up all the clothes our Navajo friend rejected, along with stacks of kitsch and old cosmetics.

I suggested VickyC call the Sikh kid, since he also coveted a number of valuables but had run out of cash. He appeared in an instant, delighted to get a Giants athletic jacket, a bunch of other baseball clothes, and various tschochkies not to be missed. (What is that kid going to do with that stuff?)

These folks virtually vacuumed the front yard! By the time we were done, all we had to do was haul the trash to the bins in the alleys and carry the tables back inside.

So, it was a great success. To celebrate, we went to dinner at one of those urban underground restaurants that no one knows anything about but everyone should. If you’re ever in Phoenix, it’s the Piccolo Cucina at the corner of Oak and Seventh Street. Don’t miss it.
🙂
hágoónee’ for now

Photos:
California Yard Sale
by S. Michael Miri

Power use cut—energy conserved!

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Wow! The electric bill just arrived. Salt River Project has started including a bar graph to compare 2008’s month-by-month kilowatt-hour usage with 2007’s. Though it’s a little hard to read, I’d say that this month I’ve dropped my power consumption by about 275 kWh off the same period last year, from about 875 to about 600 kWh. The bill is only $63.52, probably an all-time low. It also looks like I consumed about 150 kWh less than I did last month.

How? Here are the strategies I’ve been using:

1. Replace most incandescent bulbs with CFLs.
2. Cut the pool pump’s run time to four hours a day.
3. Jack up the thermostat in the summertime and jack it down in the winter.
4. Leave the air-conditioning or heat off if temperatures are even remotely tolerable.
5. This month, use a space heater instead of the central heating.

Last month, I did use the HVAC to heat the house on a half-dozen or so mornings when the house was chilly; as a result, usage dropped only a few kWh compared to the same month in 2007. But at the beginning of the current billing cycle, I bought a space heater and have used it to take the chill off only in the rooms where I hang out (not the bedroom). I’ve been using it just in the mornings in the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Even though this month has been a lot cooler, the bill was $13 less than last month’s! It’s about $10 less than the 2007 bill—not bad, considering that SRP raised its rates by 6 percent this year.

This confirms my suspicions that, protestations of the air-conditioning service guys notwithstanding, it’s insane to heat and cool eight rooms when I occupy three rooms. I’m going to move forward with my scheme to install a room air conditioner in the bedroom. The programmable thermostat is already in place (hasn’t been used yet this winter, because I’ve left the system off). Now all I have to do is buy a unit and find someone who can cut a hole in the wall, install it, and caulk around it correctly. The bedroom has no window—only a sliding door—and so the contraption will have to go in a block wall. But since Satan, the previous owner, put one in the garage, I don’t see why I can’t get one in the bedroom.

Air-conditioning contractors will tell you things, by way of discouraging you from dorking with the system, that appear to be…well, shall we say, mythological.

For example, you hear all the time that you should not leave the air-conditioning off until the day starts to get uncomfortably warm, because this will cause your house to get “heat-soaked” and make your unit work harder to cool the place back into the comfort zone. Last time my AC guy was here for the twice-yearly routine inspection, he insisted this would cause the unit to run three to five hours, nonstop.

That is just flat not true.

I’ve been in the habit of leaving the AC off until the temperatures outside reach around 98 or 100 degrees and inside are in the high 80s. The unit most certainly does not run for hours to cool the place down to 82.

Slump block
Slump block

And IMHO, there’s no such thing as “not heat-soaked.” Block walls work very much like trombĂ© walls: they gain heat during the day as the sun beats on them and ambient heat rises. They radiate heat late in the day and through the evening after the sun goes down. It does not matter whether you cool the air inside the structure, nor does it matter much whether the block has holes inside it; if your walls are made of slump block, your walls will heat up during the day and start radiating into the house about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. Concrete block has much the

Adobe block
Adobe block

same effect as adobe. If you live someplace where the evenings chill off after hot days, such as New Mexico, this is a grand thing. If you live in Arizona, where a balmy summer evening is around 95, it’s a less than perfectly ideal phenomenon.

That notwithstanding, I still wouldn’t have styrofoam, chickenwire, and mud walls. pbfttttt!

Next summer, I’m going to set the thermostat to effectively go off around 9:30 or 10:00 at night and then come back on at 82 degrees a half-hour before sunrise. Then I’m going to use the room air-conditioner to cool the bedroom to the 76 or 78 degrees I find comfortable for sleeping.

Why chill 1860 square feet at night, when I’m only occupying about 35 square feet?

Black Friday: To plunge into the maelstrom or not to plunge?

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There are a bunch of things I’ve been thinking that I’d like to get, whether or not I’m laid off next month. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning; the mobs (if any) will be in full force at the stores by now. Do I want to go out and see if I can get stuff at a discount?

Lemme think… Here are the items I imagine I need:

  • A small HDTV-ready television to sit on top of the refrigerator, to replace the tiny portable I have up there that’s too old to make the conversion.
  • A pair of nightstands large enough to accommodate a book and a glass of water without pushing the lamp off onto the floor.
  • A small occasional table for the living room, to replace a table that’s pretty much worn out.
  • A Macintosh laptop
  • Apple’s Airport gadget

Do I really WANT to run out and search for these things? Let us consider…

A small HDTV television
Televisions are stupidly overpriced these days. It’s unlikely that I can touch what ought to be a $60 gadget for much less than $350. Do I really need to spend $350 to watch the PBS NewsHour while I’m fixing dinner?

Verdict: Naaahhhh! I’ll miss Jim Lehrer come February, but there’s a perfectly fine radio in that room. I can turn on NPR News instead. Also, with the HD service, you can catch the NewsHour later in the evening on one of KAET’s three HD stations. It’s not like there’s anything else to watch during prime time, most evenings.

A pair of nightstands
dcp_22332Hmm. I would like a better pair of nightstands. The ones I have won’t accommodate much more than a lamp. The phone has to sit on the nightstand that’s on the other side of the bed from where I normally sleep. With Cassie having taken up residence on the bed, there’s now a dog as well as a broad expanse of mattress and a tangle of bedding between me and the telephone. In an emergency, climbing out of the nest and over the dog to dial 9-1-1 in the dark could pose a problem. Plus I hate it that I have to throw books and magazines on the floor under the bed when I’m ready to go to sleep, and that I have to be e-x-t-r-e-e-e-m-e-l-y careful not to bump a glass of water onto the floor if I have the temerity to bring such a thing into the bedroom.

The only pieces I’ve seen that appeal and that are anywhere near my price range are at Ethan Allen. Three hundred fifty bucks is on the high side of the price range, and when you consider that I need two of them, I’d have to get a significant discount to afford them. On the other hand, such a discount might be available today.

But…just to find out whether a discount is available, I’d have to consume a quarter tank of gas traipsing to Scottsdale through murderous traffic and then fight for a place to park. Ugh. This is not a pleasing prospect. I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. I have a perfectly fine pair of nightstands that will do. I just need to quit putting a glass of water on the nightstand and quit complaining about having to store reading material on the floor.

Verdict: probably nix

A small occasional table
dcp_2232Pier One apparently has been having trouble moving the junk off its floors. Those stores have sales all the time, and some of their stuff is sorta cool. I’ll bet I could get something comparable to the cheap Indian inlaid table my father rescued off the docks in Ras Tanura back in the 1950s and preserved for the ages in polyurethane.

On the other hand, probably I could spiff up the Indian table with the application of some cleanser, a bit of steel wool, and another coat of polyurethane.
Verdict: Go buy some mineral spirits, a small can of polyurethane, and a paint brush.

A Macintosh laptop
At first blush, the comment on that proposition is har har har har har!
On the other hand… I’ve been getting some ominous error messages from the iMac—yesterday even M’hijito couldn’t figure out what its problem was—and my Quicken records have been converted to Mac format and can’t be unconverted. If I’m to keep my Quicken archives with any continuity, I’ll have to stay with Apple.

On the other other hand, I could start anew on January 1 with a much, much cheaper PC. The MacEmperor, after all, has few if any clothes. Both platforms have their shortcomings and their annoyances. It’s easy to store all of one’s Quicken files in PDF format, so at least I’d have records in case of an audit.

But on the other hand, Windows is annoying as hell; Dell’s customer service varies from nonexistent to excruciating; and all the antivirus, antimalware, and firewall software clogs the operating system to the point where it barely runs. Ugh. Do I really want to get another one of those things?
Verdict: If I don’t buy any tables I could probably afford a small Mac laptop. Maybe.

Apple Airport
appleairportthingieDo I need this?

No

Do I want it?

Yesh.

Can I afford it?

Sure.

Verdict: Probably. Maybe. Get this. Yeah. Get this.

Well, you can be sure that the Apple Store won’t be offering any discounts. They never do…’cause they don’t have to. So there’s no hurry to race out and get these highly optional pieces of gear.

Think I’ll stay off the streets today. It’s time to do the laundry, anyway.

Moral of the story: Weigh each purchase before running out to buy it on sale. You may save yourself not just the mark-down, but the whole marked-down price. 🙂

Planning to be poor

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Over the next few days, I need to write out a plan for how I’m going to survive on a fraction of my income, which I expect I’ll have to do after the Board of Regents meets and Our Beloved Leader engineers the opportunity to declare a state of financial emergency so he can make all who are the likes of me redundant.

I’ve already figured out that it’s possible (not easy) to get by on Social Security and a tiny freelance income without moving out of my home. To do it, though, I’ll have to change my shopping, eating, and living habits in a big way. Today I won’t have time to work out the details—have to learn a new (to me) program that I’ll need for the full-time freelancing mode. But I have some ideas for the general shape of the thing:
-Identify items that I can buy in bulk at Costco, Sprouts, and co-ops.
?Compare prices of these items with prices in Walmart and Target. If items items of comparable quality can be had cheaper, get over the revulsion for Walmart and buy the stuff there.
-Get a great deal more serious about vegetable gardening
-Start collecting & clipping coupons. Learn the trick of getting goods cheaply at CVS and Walgreen’s.
-Identify specific classes of household goods (such as detergents) that can be purchased at yard sales.
-Get a room air-conditioner installed in the bedroom ASAP, while there’s still some money to do it.
-Identify two or three thrift stores in or near upscale neighborhoods. Check them out to see what kinds of stuff they carry and what prices will be like.
-Turn off the watering system (it needs to go off for the winter, anyway). Plug all the drippers around xeriscapic plants.
-Identify things that can be yard-saled or sold on Craig’s List.
-Cut the present budget to reflect the amount I will have post-layoff. Bank savings to use as “cushion” in checking account.

So it goes. Maybe I can sell the junk around the house for enough to pay for the room air-conditioner. . .

Decluttering for fun and profit

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I’m more and more intrigued with the idea of focusing the yard’s landscaping on two or three limited outdoor living spaces and letting the rest go dormant. Why consume water and energy on elaborate plantings that you never see and that never directly benefit you?

Matter of fact, my yard lends itself to this proposed new philosophy. The large front courtyard, enclosed by a thick screen of shrubbery blocking the view of Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum, makes a nice place to sit in the evenings and functions as a welcoming front entry. The back porch is a wonderful outdoor dining room when the weather is nice, which is all of autumn, winter, and spring. And the covered deck to the west, with its climbing roses and shady trees, is a lovely green bower in which to enjoy a cup of coffee and read the morning paper at pretty much any time of year.

Thinking of exterior space as living space renders about a third of my large lot redundant. The chunk of real estate to the west of the driveway, which hosts a water-intensive (and dying) ash tree, wads of asparagus ferns, nine large shrubs, three desert morning glories the size of giant squids, a pointless lantana, a struggling Meyer lemon, a mountain laurel, a bougainvillea, a sickly cactus garden, and a feral bougainvillea, does nothing for the quality of my life. Or for anyone else except Gerardo, who gets hired now and again to beat back the jungle. The narrow strip along the east wall has only one function: to grow three desert birds of paradise and three yellow cassia until they block the public sidewalk, at which point they enrich Gerardo a bit more. These plants do nothing other than to add to Gerardo’s income: they provide no privacy, they bear no edible fruit, and they’re not visible from any part of the house that I inhabit.

So: in front, west of the driveway, all the shrubs go except three cassia along the west lot line. Out with the ugly morning glory mats. Move some of the irrigation drippers over to give the lemon tree extra water and shut off the rest. Out with the moribund ash tree! Replace it with one of the infant vitex trees, potted babes of the pretty tree in back, which someday will become a nice xeriscapic shade tree (possibly not in my lifetime, but someday). Out with the water-intensive asparagus ferns. Boug stays. Mountain laurel stays. Meyer lemon stays. Turn off the water to everything else.

In back, remove three unthriving, unseen, and unappreciated roses. Turn off the water to those beds.

Remove all the pointless shrubs along the east exterior side wall. Turn off the water.

Prune the trees and shrubs that form the visual barrier between my front windows and Dave’s pig sty. Cut off the water to all these extremely xeriscapic weeds. They should do just fine without being watered all the time.

I think of getting rid of the overgrown and redundant plantings as a variety of decluttering, one that should work to frugal effect. It will shut off the watering system to a third or a half of the yard.

Will the plan save money? Dunno. It stands to reason that turning off a third of the watering system would cut my bill by 33%, but it’s not that simple.Part of the city water bill goes to pay for trash pickup and sewer service.Some of the water, of course, is consumed by dish- and clothes-washing and by bathing. In the heat of summer, all the potted plants clustered on the deck and back porch have to be watered every single day, or they will die. The 18,000-gallon pool also draws a fair amount of water, particularly in summer, when it loses two or three inches a week to evaporation. The time I wandered off and left the hose running in the pool, almost overflowing the darn thing, did not help matters.

Let’s say it saves 25% on the water bill. My highest bill this year (so far) was $208. My lowest bill last winter was $63; at that time almost none of the exterior plantings got any water, nor did the pool need refilling. Assuming the base cost of water, sewer, and trash pickup is $63, the summertime cost of watering the yard and potted plants must be around $145 (i.e., $208 – $63). Twenty-five percent of the hot-weather exterior water bill would be $36.25, a modest but respectable saving that will grow as the city jacks up the cost of water.

In addition to closing down all the flora that doesn’t bear food, cast significant shade, or contribute to livable space, I’m also putting timers on the hose bibs. These will shut the water off after a specified time, obviating another pool overflow fiasco.

This is stage one of a larger project to cut the costs of living in the house, hopefully to the point where I can stay in my home during retirement.

Tomorrow I plan to call the air-conditioning company and ask them to install a programmable thermostat, and also to find out if they can restore the rusted-out swamp cooler so it will run next summer without my having to replace it. A new swamp cooler costs as much as a new refrigeration unit. While a swamp cooler runs much cheaper than a regular air-conditioner, it would take several years to pay for itself in savings. The one I put on my old house made my allergies kick up so badly it gave me excruciating headaches. Coolers at other people’s houses haven’t had that effect, but since Proserpine said she and Satan never used this one because it gave her headaches, I’m not springing to install a new one.

I’m also going to find out if it’s possible to shut off the central air conditioning on summer nights and run only a room air conditioner in the bedroom. If doing so wouldn’t cause any harm (I’ve been told that closing off a single room in summer is counterproductive, and so this could be, too), then surely cooling just one room instead of ten (twelve, if you count the bathrooms as “rooms”) would save a ton of money.

This winter I’m going to buy space heaters and heat only the room I’m sitting in. I hope to avoid running the central heating altogether, or at least limit its use to the few days when temperatures are close to freezing and it’s raining, too. Even on cold nights, the sun usually warms the house to tolerable levels by ten in the morning. Cassie has a natural fur coat, and I can wear sweatshirts.

It will be interesting to see if these strategies work to bring down the cost of running the house. If they don’t, I will not be able to stay here after my job ends.

Why didn’t I think of that?

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Last evening Cassie and I walked past the proprietorship of an eight-year-old entrepreneur, who sells garden flowers out of a sidewalk stand built of his mom’s card table and some paper signs. Turns out the kid has made about $70 from his various projects, which also include peddling the citrus from the backyard trees and handing out gift cards to relatives. Kid and a half!

Chatting with his mom, I learned the family had recently moved in, after her mother-in-law, the home’s original owner, had passed. Sad though they were to lose the grandmother, they were thrilled to be in the house, which they’ve begun to renovate.

Among several things she revealed, the young mother told me that her mother-in-law had demarcated certain parts of the yard as outdoor living areas; other parts she simply wrote off. This explained why half the front yard was green and happy, and half was mostly bare dirt. The parts of the large lot that she didn’t personally use as living space did not get water wasted on them.

Click! Here I am sitting here wondering how the heck to cut some of the amazing costs of living in my quite desirable house, one of which is the astonishing water bill, which rises apace.

My house has an advantage over the mother-in-law’s, in that it’s already desert-landscaped. Where no plants grow, rock mulch covers the ground. But the problem is, I don’t take advantage of it: the place isn’t a desert…it’s a jungle!

The frontyard west of the driveway is overwatered, because I couldn’t make the landscaper understand that the potted plants around the westside deck need to be watered every day in summer and so they needed to be on their own valve. Disregarding the Female Voice, he linked the front west with the irrigation lines that water the potted plants. This means that all summer long a half-a-yardful of xeriscapic desert plants get watered every day. Needless to say, I’ve quite the thicket out there.

There’s no reason I can’t have about two-thirds of the berserk plants removed and then simply put plugs in every one of the drippers. Let those xeriscapic plants fend for themselves during the summer, or haul a sprinkler out to them about once a month. That would cut a substantial part of the water bill.

Ditto the useless plants along the outside of the eastside back wall, whose main purpose seems to be to block pedestrians from strolling along the sidewalk and to provide cover for the bums who use that wall as their public toilet. Why am I watering plants that don’t populate my living space? There, too, Gerardo could yank out the plants and we could plug all the drippers: more water saved!

Most of the plants in the east front yard are highly xeriscapic. Several of those—a palo brea tree, a vitex, a yellow oleander, a cassia, and a Mexican bird of paradise—were installed to create a visual screen between my front windows and Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. That they do, effectively…and a little weirdly, given that they’ve grown into something that resembles a huge green bunker instead of a screen. Now that they’re firmly established, they also shouldn’t need to be watered more than once or twice a week. Plug up their drippers, for hevvinsake, and drag a sprinkler out there every two or three weeks during the driest part of summer. And get the darn things trimmed!

The weeds between the flagstones in the front courtyard have crowded out the dichondra, are always out of control and usually overrun with hated bermudagrass. Dig out the dirt between those pavers, fill the spaces with river rock, and turn off the sprinklers. Connect octopus heads to the sprinklers and run dripper hose to just a few ornamentals, thereby bringing a stop to a great deal of water wastage there, too.

I’ll bet that by mapping out three relatively small outdoor living areas—the back porch, the westside deck, and the front courtyard with its backdrop of xeriscapic shrubbery—and cutting off the water to everything else except the fruit trees, I could save $40 or $50 a month on water. More, maybe: the base water, sewer, and trash bill is about $60; my bills have been more than twice that. Whatever dies gets pulled out. The yard would look better because it would be less overgrown, and my checking account would also look a lot better.