Idle essays

Lordie! Looking back over all those defunct financial statements made me wonder where on earth I left my IQ during and after the divorce. I did sooo many stupid things back then, not the least of them leaving the corporate lawyer in the first place.

Shortly after the divorce was final, I hired a financial adviser who was the ex-wife of one of my husband’s ex-partners. Inexplicably, I imagined that these characteristics plus an ambitious post-marital career made her magically trustworthy.

In the first place, she was charging me through the wazoo, and in the second, she gave out bad advice. She had me dump a bunch of money into a mutual fund that was…well, OK, but just OK. And it, too, had high expenses — the word “Vanguard” was never mentioned.

But the worst thing she did screwed me over royally.

The ex- was five years older than I. When the alimony ended, he would be 59½ and I would be 54. Under the IRA rules, because together we would have been eligible to take withdrawals when he turned 59½, at that time we each could draw down from our respective halves of the fund. But, unknown to me, this largesse did not come without strings.

I figured I could get my freelance writing and book packaging business up and running in five years, particularly since my business partner was experienced in publishing and public relations and well known in Arizona. By the time the alimony ran out, I expected to be able to support myself with the business and the interest from this large IRA and a couple of smaller investments.

The IRA resided in the now defunct First Interstate Bank of Arizona. Their investment department also left something to be desired. A few years later, they freaking lost a municipal bond by dropping it, unregistered, into the snail-mail.

Long before that, though, my friend/financial advisor was lobbying me to move the IRA from  First Interstate to the care of her firm, thereby allowing her to start charging lots of money. Understanding exactly nothing about mutual fund and financial management costs, that’s exactly what I did: I rolled it over to a new IRA with her company.

A-n-n-n-n-d… Guess what? In the eyes of the law, rolling my half over made it “mine,” not mine and the ex’s. And so this move — effectively creating a “new” IRA — meant now I couldn’t withdraw a penny until I was 59½!

Well, of course, once the alimony stopped, there was no way I could reliably support myself on a freelance income alone, and I knew it. Ultimately, the upshot was that I had to go out and get a full-time job, selling the business to my partner. That’s how I ended up at the Great Desert University.

Why did I stay with her after that? What on earth was I thinking? I don’t even recall registering that this mistake was, after all, hers — a CFP with an MBA in finance and a brag that she specialized in single women’s money management should have known better. Later, the fact that she migrated from firm to firm to firm should have been a tip-off that her competence might not be the best.

Eventually I did walk, straight to the very excellent, indeed brilliant, financial manager who founded the firm that today is known as Stellar Capital Management. The guy had been there all along. I knew about him. Why on earth didn’t I turn to him first?

Here’s a weird one: I was so terrified of debt that, to ensure that I would never charge more than was in the checking account, every time I made a credit-card charge, I would write a check for it, enter it in the checkbook, and subtract the amount from the balance. Then at the end of the month I would stuff all these checks — sometimes 15 or 20 of them! — into an envelope and send them with the payment coupon. Gaaaaaaaahhhh! Please: steal my identity!

What possessed me to do that? Well, it was more than just fear of being unable to pay the month-end bill. Cash flowed through my fingers like water, and paying with checks or a card allowed me to keep a better grip on spending, mostly because both of those methods generated a paper trail. Writing a check at every cash register was a pain…it actually was easier for me to write a flurry of checks to the credit card. And I had no idea how to use Excel. I’d never even opened the program. ’Twasn’t until I went to work at GDU that my opposite number there showed me how to use it to create a grade book, and from there it didn’t take long to figure out that if it would keep track of grades, it would also keep track of a budget.

Speaking of stupid, revisiting all those old pay statements by way of grinding them up also unearthed a lot of correspondence over the fiasco that occurred when GDU’s leadership decided to switch from bimonthly to semiweekly pay at the same time as they made a switch from whoever was our payroll vendor to PeopleSoft. Creating and inflicting the subsequent chaos, described by a Wall Street Journal reporter as “all part of the plan,” cost the university $30 million.

My god! What a mess! Repeatedly, despite screams of rage from me, they would fail to withhold my 403(b) contributions and then, with the following check, hit me with a double whammy — leaving me to scramble to pay my bills that month. PeopleSoft decided that because of my job classification I had no right to vacation time (!!). They erased my accrued vacation time — which amounted to five or six weeks, since I hardly ever took time off — and stopped tracking vacation hours. And I was one of the lucky ones. At least I got paid, even if the amounts and statements were wrong.

Some people didn’t get paid for weeks. At least one guy got a paycheck in the amount of $0.00. Some got double-paid and, when they tried to return the redundant paychecks in person to HR, were told their pay would be docked that amount the following pay period. Some got double-paid, and PeopleSoft never noticed — if you kept your mouth shut, you just might get away with banking an extra paycheck.

Great plan, dear bosses!

Windy City Gal (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!) remarks that she’s taking riding lessons — so that, among other reasons, she can take a couple of wonderful riding excursions when she visits Scotland later this year. Wow! How cool does that sound?

Reminded me of how much I miss the ranch outside of Yarnell, where we had a small herd of horses. My favorite was Babe, a neatly trained quarterhorse on whose capacious back I performed some of the stupidest stunts of  my entire life. Flying down the Kirkland Junction road at a full gallop…bareback. What was I smoking?

Well you might ask! Next to me on the left was my best friend on Old Stewball, a retired racehorse that wanted nothing, nothing other than to proceed at a dead run. When a horse falls or bolts and I need to get off fast, I tend to jump to the left…don’t know why, just instinct. If I’d fallen or jumped off Babe, I would’ve gone right under Stewball’s hooves.

WTF. I survived, and Babe survived, solely by the grace of God.

Presumably that’s how we all survive, by Her grace.

Why didn’t we think of it before?…

• Go to Costco about 6 or 7 p.m., and you avoid the crowds. The place stays open until 8:30, but by 6:00 or so, the mob has gone home to dinner.

• Those clear plastic boxes that hold pre-picked and supposedly washed lettuce? Emptied and washed, they’re perfect to hold your salad makings: a bag of carrots, a couple bunches of green onions, a half-used cucumber, a bunch of radishes, a bell pepper, a small jar of artichoke hearts. No more rummaging through  refrigerator drawers every time you want to make a tossed salad!

• Salad greens that come in those clear plastic boxes usually wilt soon and often end up half-spoiled. One could avoid that and still have convenience by saving the boxes, then buying whole heads of lettuce, washing them, breaking off the leaves, patting them dry, and storing them in the boxes. Put a paper towel in there to help stabilize humidity in the box.

• A digital tool that runs on batteries needs to have fresh batteries. Change the batteries in the bathroom scale, known to run two or three pounds lighter than the balance scale in the doc’s office, and lo! It comes up with a number half-a-pound heavier than it did. Still not accurate, but closer.

• Members of the One Percent are exempt from ordinary laws that apply to the hoi polloi.

Case in point: woman is walking her large dog through the park, off the leash. I have to maneuver Cassie away from Poopsie, who approaches us aggressively and does not come to call. Later, as I come around the last leg of my jog around the park, I see Poopsie running loose in the park, no sign of his human. She’s across the street opening the back door of her vehicle for him. He runs across the road — a feeder street through the neighborhood, and this is now high rush hour — and jumps in. The oncoming car, fortunately, is far enough away to miss hitting him. She climbs into the driver’s seat and, smiling, drives contentedly away in her Mercedes SUV.

Wonder what a permit to let your dog run loose costs?

• If I would not check e-mail at 5:00 a.m., I wouldn’t be sucked into the client’s vortex of confusing changes in proof 3 (!!!) and then maybe I could get out the door before 6:30, when the sun is glaring in everyone’s eyes and the thermometer is already pushing Hotter Than Hell.

• If I would jog first and then walk Cassie, that would circumvent her occasional not-gonna-do-this mood, and then I wouldn’t have to drag her back from the park, put her in the house, and start over again.

• The brand-new, very nice Sprouts is on the canal. I could ride my bike down there, if there’s a place to lock it up at the store. Come to think of it, after the weather cools off, I could walk to that Sprouts! And that would be a long enough hike to make up the day’s required aerobic self-abuse.

• If one would not take on any new clients, one wouldn’t have the issue of having too g.d. much work to do. Betcha one wouldn’t see any more mind-boggling, byzantine labyrinths of corrects on corrects on corrects on corrects, either.

So on Wednesday it was up to Yarnell with SDXB, there to visit La Maya, who is combining the summer, a fall semester of online courses, and a spring sabbatical to engineer a six-month retreat from the craziness that is her life down here in the Valley. She’s using the time to finish the anthology that she’s compiling with a co-editor (and that I’m copyediting) and to complete the monograph she’s begun. I expect she’ll spin off at least a couple of articles, too.

It’s so lovely up there, cool and breezy and quiet. Very quiet. Very soothing.

About a third of the town is for sale, thanks to the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression. Walking around, we came upon the CUTEST little mini-house. They want $140,000 for it. Somebody bought one of the old miner’s shacks, basically demolished it to a wall, and then rebuilt completely. The result is…hard to describe.

The place is basically one room, but not. It’s a large one-story space where a generously sized bedroom has been partitioned off. There’s a very handsome, well appointed kitchen and a huge living space. And a service porch with a washer-dryer hookup and, I think, room enough for a freezer. An upright freezer would certainly fit in there, and you probably could get a small chest freezer into the space.

At first, peering in the windows, I thought DOWNSIZE!!!! Here’s your chance to downsize with a vengeance.

On second glance, though, it didn’t look to me as though the place has enough space for even one decent clothes closet. That would make it useful, alas, only for weekend retreats. It doesn’t look like you could reasonably expect to live there, no matter how much junk you divested yourself of.

While I could fit all my clothes into one closet, here in the Valley one of my house’s bedroom closets is completely given over to office supplies and computer gear. And it’s full. I need that stuff to do business, so, alas, there’s no practical way I could actually live up there. At least, not in that place.

Another holds linens plus the space heaters in winter and the fans in summer. No place in that pretty little house to fit your sheets and towels, either, as far as I could see.

But oh, it’s totally cute. It has its own well, which frees one from a very large expense (the local water company knows it has the residents by the short hairs). The natural landscaping with big local trees and a pile of granite boulders in back is just gorgeous.

Not a single helicopter buzzed us all day long. One noisy fighter jet passed by to the west, a single outlier from Luke Air Force Base. Otherwise, the sky was the way a sky is supposed to be: quiet, except for the occasional wind blowing through the trees. And the occasional bird tweeting, cooing, or cawing.

What would it be like to live there?

Quiet, I imagine.

And limited: when there are only so many people in a town, there are only so many personalities to get to know. And only so many activities, other than arguing over the water company, ever go on. And there’s no place to shop. by that, we mean really no place to shop. The locals have to drive all the way in to Prescott, Wickenburg, or Phoenix to visit a Costco or a supermarket. One gas station (imagine what gas costs in that place!).

It’s a great place to visit, but…yeah.

The wish i could afford a vacation home thought wafted briefly through my mind, followed by the ARE YOU CRAZY? thought. Even if I could afford it, do I or do I not have enough work taking care of the place I’m living in, which is itself in a place that people pay to come and visit.

Speaking of taking care of the place, it’s past time to finish the laundry and clean up this shack. Bye!

Lookit this little guy!

Click on the images for larger, clearer view.

There’s a hibiscus that should not be with us. The mother plant spent several years living on the shaded west-facing deck, where it would occasionally put out a kind of peach-colored blossom but by and large just sat around looking sickly. I thought it was some sort of hybrid of a pink hibiscus. Last fall, it was attacked by a web-spinning bug that encased the tips of its limbs in nests for its offspring. Even though I cleaned and cut them off, the plant never recovered.

After planning to put it out of its misery, I relented. Transplanted it into a larger pot and dollied it around to the front patio, where it suffered through the winter — survived February’s hard frost by dint of being rolled into the living room, where it looked even more miserable than it had looked on the west deck. Carted back outside when the weather warmed, it hunkered in its pot, stunned.

I really thought it was going to die, and kept thinking, “Gotta throw that thing out in the alley!” It was saved, though, by the human’s innate laziness.

Weeks passed. The bug-eaten tips slowly, gradually, glacially emitted a few sprigs of post-apocalyptic-looking new growth. Didn’t look very promising, but I was still too lazy to drag the thing out to the alley.

But lo! As temps approached 100, the plant approached viability! Some actual leaves appeared, and yesterday out popped this scarlet red blossom!

Who’d have thunk it? Apparently hibiscus produce faded blossoms when they don’t have enough light. Why this flower has a hole in one petal, I have no idea…the place is overrrun by slugs at night — one of them probably snacked on the bud.

Speaking of survivors, we have this accursed thing:

That is the undead remnant of the devil-pod tree from Hell, allegedly killed in December of 2011. That was 18 months ago! The thing spawns dozens of zombie offspring, each one craving to grow a hundred feet high, preferably out of the footing of a block wall or the foundation of a house.

This little gem is a good thirty feet from the Undead Stump, where it arrived by tunneling under a concrete patio and coming up behind a set of block-and-board shelves. Another sprout is all the way on the other side of the swimming pool. Round-up, which I’ve been advised to use on the damn thing, seems to fertilize it, not kill it.

Talked to a couple of arborists. One said to just keep on spraying every sprig with Round-up. Another will come by later this week to see about grinding the stump out, though probably it’s too late for that. And a third recommended drilling holes in it and filling them with an herbicide. Lovely.

The other day I found a tiny praying mantis nymph clinging to a wall in the house. Glorioski!

Eventually I managed to catch her without harming her and place her in the plants outside. How cool can this be? This morning I found her prancing around in the parsley. 😀 Long may she feast on mosquitoes!

This weekend M’hijito and I went from scorning Mother’s Day as a grossly commercialized Hallmark Holiday to indulging in a Mother’s Day frenzy. Saturday he came over here and prepared astonishing pizzas and glorious globe artichokes, on which we gorged until we were stuporous.

The sauce is mostly garlic — like a half-dozen cloves or more, chopped — with Italian canned tomatoes. Awesome! This tiny bit leftover from the pizza later got used to top a grilled steak and later still (this evening), enhanced with a dollop of red wine, made an incredible spaghetti sauce. With shrimp.

Sunday we went to a Mother’s Day brunch at the home of his friends’ mother, replete with galloping grandchildren and the most elaborate organic aquaculture arrangement you ever saw. So that was a lot of fun.

Altogether, fairly mellow.

In other precincts…

Wild about Finance hosts the Carnival for Young Adults  and kindly included Funny’s squib about increasing property values and gentrification by young single urban adults in these parts. Neil Frankle hosts the Carnival of Personal Finance at Wealth Pilgrim, and he included the FaM post on the decision to drive the Dog Chariot until it dissolves into the pavement.