Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

RVs and Credit-Card Checks, Oh My!

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😀 Frugal Scholar remarks on the adventures of a new-to-her (and me) blogger at I am the working poor. The articulate and interesting IATWP blogs sporadically, apparently whenever she can break loose a few minutes from what sounds like a very hard-working life. She and her DH have succeeded in paying off their debts and even built up a small emergency fund on the proceeds of low-income jobs.

Most recently, though, she reports that they made a big-ticket impulse buy: purchased an RV from some guy to whom the DH delivered a pizza. They’ve been coveting an RV for months, possibly years, but been unable to swing it before this.

To pay for it, they used one of those “checks” emitted by credit-card companies. By way of luring them back into debt, their credit-card issuer sent them a fistful of blank checks that, if used, would nail them into a one-year no-interest loan.

They figure they’ll be able to pay off the amount in 11 months. Hope so. It’s clear they understand this as a loan, but she doesn’t say whether they realize that typical one-year no-interest deals sock you with a whole year’s interest if you don’t pay in full by the end of the year; after that, a hefty monthly interest fee begins to accrue.

Lordie! So much can happen in 11 months! Car accident, pregnancy, illness, job loss…{gasp!} Maybe I’m too much of a pessimist. But as I’ve noted before, the basis of frugality is pessimism. One saves for a rainy day because one believes it will rain. A lot.

SDXB and I once bought an RV.

Holy mackerel! Talk about a hole in the ground into which to pour money!!! We finally unloaded it, after months of unsuccessfully trying to sell it through the local Truck Trader, to a friend who used it as a rolling condo while he passed some months editing an Albuquerque newspaper (no joke: he lived in the paper’s parking lot); then spent lengthy periods living out of it during trips to Mexico and as a campground manager in US national parks. For him, it was a good deal. For us…not so much.

RVs are probably worth the money if you like to hang out in campgrounds—they don’t work well for off-road car camping, because they tend to torque on dirt roads that are poorly maintained or drop into gullies. SDXB and I were really not into crowded campgrounds. He preferred to go off by himself in the forest or desert. The idea of going camping is to find peace and quiet, not to move into a rolling apartment house with as much or more noise and people in your face as you have at home.

That’s not true of everyone, obviously. We met many folks who truly loved the campground experience. In Arizona, there’s an entire subculture of RVers, people who come here and spend eight months in commercial campgrounds during the winter and then pack up and drive to cooler climes for the summer. And while we were on the road, we did stay in some places where I could imagine lingering for quite awhile.

Sometimes I think it would be great fun to unload my house, buy an RV, toss some jeans, boots, a jacket, a six-pack of Corona, and the dog into it, and take off permanently.

But realistically…don’t think so. As if I didn’t have enough work to do!

🙂

Back in Hock Again

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Added up the bills yesterday. That’s always a thrill a minute! The cost of pulling out the hated devil-pod tree, replacing it with four new plants, blocking off the dug-up muddy area with wire fencing so Charley can’t excavate everything, repairing the damage done to Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner by the tree’s last blast of gunky pollen, and while we were at it having Gerardo pull out a couple of ugglified superannuated plants in front and replacing those ran me over $600 into the hole.

🙁

Luckily, there’s some $1700 in the short-term emergency fund, so I’ll still have a thousand bucks to keep the car running or fix the plumbing or deal with whatever damnfool thing happens next.

Ran all these bills up on the AMEX credit card, which gives me a kickback once a year. A single big-ticket item can make that little bonus add up to $400 or $600, which is nice. Usually, though, I just think of it as ultimately cutting the cost of gasoline by a few percentage points. Doesn’t help at the gas pump, but when the money comes in, it goes right straight back into the survival fund, extending the time I can live on post-tax savings as long as possible.

Of course, the kickback come-on would avail you naught if you didn’t pay off your credit card every month. Obviously, having some lender give you two cents back for every five bucks you have to cough up in interest is, shall we say, not in your interest. However, if you’re in the habit of paying your bills every month, it’s an easy way to pick up some free money.

Other kinds of cards might work to your advantage if you always run a tab or are trying to pay down existing debt so you can get in the habit of paying in full—a zero percent card, for example, would be useful in either of those instances. Depending on your needs, it’s crucial to shop around for the best credit card deals. The last time I got peeved at Chase, I checked into a number of options for the S-corporation’s card before finally deciding that Costco’s AMEX card was the best choice for the business as well as for the personal card—interestingly, they’ll issue a corporate card in addition to a personal card, even if your personal card is associated with the so-called “business” membership.

At any rate, the yard should start to look pretty good once it warms up. Amazingly, the big cocoa-red rose that guards my office window survived last summer’s unholy heat (only two others in front made it through). I decided not to prune it back this winter because it suffered so violently–give it a chance to rest. But some fertilizer and water produced this:

To help drive myself into bankruptcy, I hired Gerardo and his sidekick to hack out two overgrown and shabby-looking plants on the front patio, pull up a root from the deceased tree that once again was heaving the brick pavement in back, help me wrestle with pool equipment, and generally clean up the Funny Farm. They came trotting right over at my electronic beck, and the job was godawful, so as usual when he does a lot of extra work for me, I paid him a chunk of extra money. He replaced one of the uglies with a Texas yellowbell, which is already in bloom:

Charley decided an overgrown, invasive wad of bunch grass growing in the front courtyard made a nice mattress. He probably did find the highest and best use of that plant…but if it was tired-looking before, it was fully uglified by the time he rolled in it a few times. Running low on money, I asked Gerardo to try planting a yellow bird of paradise that had volunteered in a pot, where it’s never done well:

It looks pretty peakèd here, but it’s a hot-weather plant. If it survives, it should fill out when summer gets here. May even bloom. They have a spectacular flower, and they have the strange habit of tossing their seed pods into the air with a funny POP sound.

Come evening, Charley sits by the front door or out in the courtyard waiting for M’hijito to get off work and come pick him up. He stares at every passing car, in hopes that the next one will be His Human’s.

And when at last the Human gets here, we have an explosion of doggy joy…

Mare’s tails riding ahead of a storm system made for a gaudy sunset last night. A friend who lives about 35 miles from the Reno wildfire says they’re hoping for enough rain to douse the flames.

And so it goes.

 

Sick Again…or Still?

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{yuck} Three or four days ago, a heavy cough developed, right out of the blue. No cold symptoms, no flu symptoms: no sore throat, no head congestion, no laryngitis, no achy muscles, no headache, no nothing. It’s a chest-wrenching, goopy cough, one of the worst I’ve ever had.

So day before yesterday I traipsed across the city to a revered physician at the revered Mayo (gotta find a doctor closer to my house!!). She opined that it’s not pneumonia, it’s not bronchitis, and it doesn’t appear to be an allergy. Her theory is valley fever.

Lovely.

She shrugged and said it most likely will go away in a week or ten days.

Right. What she’s shrugging off is the fact that I tested positive for valley fever in my early twenties. That was over 40 years ago.

Valley fever is caused by a fungus that lives in the low Southwestern deserts. It doesn’t go away. Your body may suppress the symptoms, but once the fungus has moved in, it’s there to stay. And a flare-up, years later, can develop into something very nasty, indeed.

It would explain a lot: like why, after years without so much as a sniffle, I developed a mean bug right after I took that damn triple-whammy flu shot (no more of that after this!) and have been sick off and on ever since. This started last September or October and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

So her doctorhood ordered a chest X-ray and a valley fever titer test. The results of the latter, whose reliability is questionable in the first place, won’t come back for a week or ten days.

Meanwhile, though, SDXB has developed a similar goopy cough after two months of the 10-week virus that’s been going around. He thinks what I have is the same as what he has.

However…he developed it as  part of a rhinovirus infection. In contrast, I got the 10-week respiratory bug shortly after I took a flu shot last fall. Eventually it went away. Then a few weeks later I picked up another cold. Shook that off in about 10 days, and have been feeling just fine for a while. It was completely gone and had been gone for several weeks when this new thing developed. I have no other cold symptoms: just a nasty cough.

Well. And one other odd thing: about a week before the cough appeared, I started sleeping all night!!!

It was so wonderful! Or so I thought. Suddenly, after a good ten or fifteen years of five- and six-hour nights, I’m sleeping seven hours, without waking up and watching the clock tick for two or three hours. Then it’s eight hours. Then nine hours. Then right before the cough started I slept ten hours. I haven’t slept ten hours straight since I was a teenager. On reflection, that is not normal.

Then the other evening I was walking the dog and felt a tightness in the chest, like I couldn’t breathe in enough oxygen. It passed, and I didn’t think much about it. And now this expectorant cough comes along. Pretty clearly there’s a connection; and I expect there’s some connection with the oversleeping, too.

Well. I hope this is just another virus and not valley fever, because valley fever can develop into a chronic, crippling, and life-threatening disease. The first book I edited, as a young thing, was by a pulmonologist who specialized in valley fever, and I’ll tell ya: it was real scary to read. The treatment, like chemotherapy for cancer, is about as bad as the disease. The infection or the treatment, one or the other, is likely to weaken your health permanently.

🙄 Just what I need to make my day!

Image: C. Immitis. U.S. Federal Government. Public domain.

w00t! Guest Post at Planting Money Seeds

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Over at her new blog, Planting Money Seeds, problogger and full-time freelancer Miranda Marquit has kindly published a guest post from Funny, Work Is a Place.

All you who think you’d like to work from home—or who already are doing so—should take a look at it.

😀

Therein lies a tale, one I figured was way too long for the guest post’s purposes. As I’ve suggested at Miranda’s place, when you work from a home office, sometimes it’s not easy to persuade people that you are working.

When my son was little, I had a very active freelance business. To give you a feel for this, one day a friend and I went into a Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and I realized that two of my books and a half-dozen of my various articles were sitting on the bookshelves. They got there because I hustled a lot of business and I made it a point to operate professionally. That last bit included never missing a deadline.

One late October day I was pounding out a story. It needed to move off my desk within a day; meanwhile, another couple of assignments were hanging fire. So I had three assignments that had to be done that week.

Phone rings.

It’s some volunteer mother at the school. She tells me—does not ask, but tells—that I’m to drive a vanful of five-year-olds to a pumpkin patch south of the city for a Hallowe’en outing. And I’m to do this tomorrow.

Understand: I have not volunteered to do anything. This is not a co-op school: we’re paying more than the tuition at the University of Arizona’s medical school send our kid there. I do not volunteer because I’m not the join-y type and because I truly do not fit in with society wives. I make them uncomfortable (that’s probably not the word for it; the actual word begins with b- and ends with -y) and they  make me uncomfortable to the nth power. And even if I were the sosh type, I was working more than full-time as a paid writer.

Sorry, said I, but I can’t do that: I’m working on a deadline and can’t drop an assignment for a client.

She would not take “no” for an answer. She continued to insist that nothing would do but what I had to drop what I was doing (which clearly, in her mind, wasn’t much), pick up a half-dozen kids, and spend the day schlepping them back and forth across the Valley.

I explained what is meant by the term “deadline.” Then I explained that I was working and I could not quit working on short notice, because I had assignments due to my editors.

Now get this: She says, “You can’t be working. I called your home phone number!”

No joke. Then she launches into a diatribe, the gist of which was I was to get off my tail and drive the kiddies to a pumpkin patch. She went absolutely ballistic.

I ended up telling her, not in a friendly tone, “NO.”

LOL! Those were the good old days!

These days, with many people telecommuting or running small businesses out of their homes, attitudes toward entrepreneurs who work at home may be changing.

I doubt it, though. For most people, work is a place, and that place is not in your back bedroom.

Yipe! Stop the World…

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Turned into a somewhat more hectic day than I’d planned.

Ohhh well. Got a lot done. In the staggeringly selfish department, while flying across the city I dropped in at what is now the last freestanding locally owned nursery in Phoenix’s once impeccably upscale North Central district. In addition to plants, they sell house and garden kitsch, and their owner apparently mainlines Mexican pottery. And so, how could I resist this?

Ohh, cute and silly-looking butter dish!!! How is it better than a clear glass butter dish from Corning or a knockoff thereof, purchased from Cost Plus? Let me count the ways…or not.

It’s so crudely painted as to be primitive. Outsider, even. I mean, seriously: most Mexican pottery artists are very skilled. This looks like it was made by the artist’s nine-year-old. And therein lies its charm. You can hear the conversation out in the studio:

NIÑO: Papà, how do you like this leaf?

HOMBRE: M’hijito, a rose leaf is nowhere near as large as a cantaloupe. Did you intend to draw a head of cabbage?

NIÑO: Rose leaf? Ay, no! This is a BANANA leaf. (NIÑO, nearing adolescence, rolls eyes heavenward with considerable expressive élan.)

HOMBRE: Uhm…claro que sì! How could I not recognize it: a banana leaf!

OMG! Puppy just made off with my slipper and now, having lost it to the raging human, is trying to reclaim it from my foot. It’s 6:00 p.m.—donde donde DONDE m’hijto mine?—and, as you might sense from the piles of paper pictured atop the desk, I must get back to work.

A Night on the Town

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Just bought a ticket to a chamber music performance that will include Karen Knudsen, one of the choir’s professional altos. I love listening to these talented artists perform—they all have lovely voices (one has a magnificent voice, IMHO). Next Tuesday’s concert, part of the annual Bach Festival, will feature Bach cantatas and include oboist Marian Buswell, organist Scott Youngs, violinist Stephen Redfield, and cellist Jan Simiz.

If you’re in central Arizona, you should consider attending one or more of the Bach Festival performances. They’re really top-flight, and a ticket for a concert is only $25 ($20 if you’re in your dotage). Five concerts will take place over a week, from January 8 to 14. Here’s a list of the events.

{sigh} Wish I could afford to go to all of them. As it is, though, one twenty-dollah hit means no meals out for me this month. Twenty bucks blows my “entertainment” (hah!) budget direct to Hell.

Had an interesting insight over the weekend, as I was setting up a Quickbooks Online account for my personal accounts. Between the $2100 drawdown from savings and the $1080 Social Security benefit, net inflow to my checking account is actually just about what it was when I was working full-time for GDU.

So…why do I live in a constant state of penury?

Because I’m paying my share of the mortgage on the downtown house out of pocket, instead of out of long-term savings as I was doing when I had a job and when the stock market was whaling along magnificently, and because I’m having to pay over $130 a month for Medigap and Medicare Part D.

So my available income (if you can call drawdowns from savings “income”) is $865 a month less than what it was in 2009.

No wonder I feel pinched all the time. And no wonder going to one inexpensive concert means I can’t go out to lunch for an entire month.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it? There’s a reason I’m working like an animal but still feeling like I have to live like an anchorite. Dang. All an anchorite has to do is tend his garden and pray all the time.

Welp, speaking of working like an animal, I agreed to spend a day with friend KJG, whose house is way to heck and gone out at the White Tanks. Will have to leave by 9:00 a.m., but I still have a project to do for a client that has to get done this morning.

So…to work.