We’re having a brief warm spell, the days in the 70s and the nights dropping not much below 50 or so. Very pleasant, and a fine excuse to tidy up the garden after the winter’s depredations. Not too much was lost, mostly because I dragged almost every pot indoors as the Big Frost approached. It’s a lovely Sunday afternoon, and after a month’s break from the fringes of academe, I’m feeling pretty relaxed. Wish this could go on forever!
Last night, after enjoying a couple of concerts in a Bach series for which I’d snagged some free tickets, I ponied up $35 to go to the grand finale, the Mass in B Minor, once described as “the greatest artwork of all time.” It was very beautiful, impressive indeed, conducted by our own illustrious choir director, who has been one of the founders of the Bach festival.
By chance, I happened to sit next to an old-time Phoenician, a gentleman who could remember what this area was like in the 40s and 50s. He was a chemist—had spent a career with the City Water Department—and his wife, a Ph.D. in chemistry, taught on the college level most of her career; their son went off to become a physicist and then gravitated to Tucson, where he presently works for a research facility.
He and his wife still live in the house they bought as newlyweds—in the very neighborhood of pretty little red brick homes M’hijito is living in! He must live a few steps from M’hijito’s house. He described with great pleasure how much they loved living there and how the area has evolved since it was out in the suburbs of a large small town.
This morning one of my choir friends, of the very couple who gave me the beautiful purple bicycle, brought in a bunch of iris bulbs she’d cleaned out of her garden. She gave me two large rooted bulbs, each of which had a babe. So now the olive tree in the front courtyard has four nascent bearded iris at its feet.
Don’t know how they’ll do there. I dug some of this winter’s compost into the holes around them, so assuming bulbs like compost, that should give them a little tonic. But over the summer it gets awfully hot out there. Under the tree is probably the most temperate place in front, but “temperate” compared to the surface of the planet Mercury is a relative term. I hope they live. Love iris.
Never did get around to finishing the tree-trimming I started yesterday. Oh well. There’s one more day before class starts, so maybe it’ll get done tomorrow.
Grabbed a few handsful of bok choy (which, amazingly, is starting to bolt to seed despite the cool weather) and chard, to embellish the rich chicken broth I concocted a day or two ago and finally bestirred myself to strain and pack up in freezer containers today. Made a very fine lunch!
The Bok Choy Monster living in the backyard was not deterred by the hard freeze. Really, I thought it would kill off the bug-eyed little guy, but nooooo… The bok choy continues to get chewed, and now the critter has moved on to the chard. So I guess I’d better eat that while there’s still some to eat.
An entire head of fresh garlic sprouted in the kitchen. So, I broke it apart and planted it where it could replace the various herbs and veggies that turned to mush in the late, great frost. I’ve never had much luck getting garlic to grow, but maybe this time will be a charm. If so, we should end up with half-a-dozen new heads of garlic. LOL! I won’t have to buy garlic all summer long.
We’re told the weather is supposed to cool again this week. How nice it would be if it would maybe not freeze again this spring. The plants are starting to spring back, and I’m very pleased at the survival rate of those I managed to drag indoors during the last freeze. This Thai basil made it with no damage (except for the loss of some leaves to a predatory human), as did its companion plant, a fine, healthy mint. I love the combination of basil and mint. And Thai basil, with its distinct overtones of licorice, is even more delicious than Italian basil.
So it goes. Wonder what’s going on in the blogosphere?
Over at Money Crush, Jackie suggests that if we must procrastinate (and who among us has any intention of giving it up?), there may be ways to procrastinate wisely.
Hmmm…. Financial Samurai adds some spice to his current grouse about tax laws by mixing a bit of sexism into the stew. It worked to get his readers talking. 😉
Budgets Are Sexy wonders how many of us fudge our earnings when we make out our income tax forms. LOL! There’s a stunt I’ve never had the chutzpah to try: vacationing in Leavenworth isn’t my idea of travel adventure.
Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has launched a new blog carnival! She’ll be hosting it every Monday in January. So, that’s cool: be sure to send her some of your golden words.
Bargain Babe is taking off for MLK Day, but her contest to win a $250 Macy’s card (and various other goodies) will run until 11:59 p.m. EST tomorrow. Get your entry in right away! 🙂
And speaking of giveaways, Donna Freedman is offering CHOCOLATES! This one also closes tomorrow (Monday).
And in the “what to do with it all?” department, Abigail over at I Pick Up Pennies was recently startled to discover a windfall: extra money in the budget.
Did you know Parmesan rinds are edible? Frugal Scholar offers a recipe from, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. Sounds pretty tasty, too.
I suffer markedly from bag lady syndrome, the haunting sense that one of these days I’m going to end up living on the street. Sometimes I wonder where the hell it comes from. Really, there’s enough in the bank to support me without my ever having to lift a finger in paying work again…but I do lift fingers—all ten of them—in that cause. What am I so scared of?
Late last summer, Sandy L wrote a post at FirstGen American that threw some light on the issue: she suggests many women are subjected to verbal abuse that leads to negative self-talk. We convince ourselves that we’ll never amount to much, because we’ve been told so. Often.
Although my father was not a drinker like Sandy’s, I spent my childhood and early adult life watching my father manipulate my mother by exploiting the fact—and it was a fact—that she couldn’t take care of herself financially. When, as he did every now and again, he would tell her that if she didn’t quit spending “his” money he was going to leave her, he was abusing her.
Now, it’s true that neither of them would have seen it that way. My guess is, they both would have regarded the basis of his threats as ordinary reality. The most she ever earned, working full-time, would not have paid our rent.
Like most women in her generation, she couldn’t support herself on whatever tiny salary she might have been able to earn. To this day, it’s a fact that a large proportion of elderly women end their lives in poverty—even if they spent most of their years in the economic middle class. As the Great Recession was about to descend on us, among women 65 and over, 37 percent of those who were divorced or separated were living in poverty; 28 percent of widows lived in poverty; and 22 percent of single, never-married women lived in poverty. Think of that. Over a third of divorcees, over a quarter of widows, over a fifth of singletons are spending their “golden years” dirt-poor.
It explains a lot about why I live in fear of ending up in a campsite beneath the Seventh Avenue Overpass. I was brought up to think women—particularly me—can’t take care of themselves. As attitudes go, it’s a very difficult one to overcome, particularly when the reality of senior women reinforces it.
My father treated me like an idiot. He made it clear he thought I was stupid, strange, and incompetent. A Phi Beta Kappa key, a doctorate, and three books published through high-quality presses did nothing but confirm his suspicions.
And yes, I was a weird little kid. Like other girls in my generation, I was brought up to be a housewife and urged to get training as a secretary, “just in case” I should someday need a job if the real breadwinner was incapacitated, died, or abandoned me and his kids. My craving to grow up to be an astrophysicist was beside the point; “you can,” I was told, “always have astronomy as a hobby.”
How fortunate I was that his influence was counterbalanced by the women on my mother’s side of the family! Though I don’t buy into Christian Science, the worldview to which my great-grandmother and great-aunt subscribed, nobody espouses “positive thinking” more powerfully than do Christian Scientists. These two, who took in my mother as a teenager and partly raised her, lived together in a pretty little Berkeley foothills bungalow after my great-grandfather died. During the process of his dying, the existence of a long-term mistress in San Francisco came to light. As you can imagine, my great-grandmother, affectionately known as “Gree,” was in no hurry to remarry after having spent a lifetime laboring as a man’s house servant, and I suppose the effect must have reverberated with her daughter, my great-aunt.
Gertrude, said great-aunt, lost her young husband in the 1917 flu epidemic, shortly after her son was born. She became an executive secretary (today the position would probably be a middle manager) at Crocker-Anglo National Bank, and from then on her pay, which must have been fairly modest, supported her, her son, and her mother in a pleasant home and in a cozy enough lifestyle. She sent her son to UC Berkeley and had enough to help him purchase land and build a beautiful house in Kensington, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. He became a vice president of Standard Oil.
They didn’t live like Queens of Sheba, but they never wanted for anything. They each lived to the age of 94, and at no time could they have been said to live in poverty. When, late in her life, I asked Gertrude if she had ever thought of remarrying, she gave me a funny look and said, “Why on earth would I ever want to take care of another man?”
The object lesson I took away from Gree and Gertrude was that you can think yourself sick and you can think yourself well: positive thinking in fact is very powerful. So is negative thinking. You can convince yourself that you should be afraid, be very afraid, and you can convince yourself that you are or easily could be helpless.
Until my generation a lot of women were socialized to think like this. It was objectively true: most women were not allowed into the workplace and could not earn enough to support themselves. When, in 1966, I went into a bank and applied for an opening in its management training program—the very same kind of job my male classmates in all majors were landing with no problem—I was told the bank didn’t hire women into their management training program, but I’d be great in the secretarial pool.
The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s changed things for all American and European women. Because of it, the world is a different place for women. But in some respects, things haven’t changed so much. Even women of considerable wealth and accomplishment, the likes of Lily Tomlin and Katie Couric, have admitted to bouts of bag-lady syndrome. In the MSN Money article that reveals that gem, Certified Financial Planner Kathy Boyle observes that this widespread fear is not altogether unrealistic:
“Being single costs 80% that of a couple, and women are seven times more likely to be single and live six years longer. . . Given a 50% divorce rate and that the average age of widowhood is 56, there’s probably good reason to be concerned.”
I’ve never succumbed to the symptoms described in this article—refusing to think about finances or feeling unable to make a decision. And I don’t stash all my assets in low-income financial instruments (to the contrary, I’ve taken some breathtaking risks…). But I do worry a lot about money, sometimes to the point of obsessiveness.
Just as you can’t deal with money by pretending it’s not there or it doesn’t matter, so you can’t deal with it by obsessing over it. Best thing to do is get the advice of a trustworthy financial advisor, learn what you can about budgeting and wealth management, make a few basic decisions, and then revisit the issue no more than three or four times a year.
One night as I lay awake worrying over money, shortly after I had divorced my husband and set out on my own, I found myself asking the question, “Can I do this?”
Those are the words that coalesced in my mind, there in the darkness.
Then I heard my great-aunt’s voice, just as clearly as if she were sitting in the room. She said, “Of course you can, my dear.”
It’s gettin’ mighty cold out there! And dark. Here in the middle of the afternoon, all the lights in the room are burning against the twilight gloom that seeps in through the windows.
A big cold front has lurched in from the West Coast. We’re supposed to see rain all day today, tonight, and tomorrow and then, as is common when a winter storm’s cloud cover lifts, a hard freeze. Thursday and Friday temps will drop into the low 20s, once again killing every plant in Phoenix that still possesses a leaf.
Under the kitchen counter and not pleased
I’ve hauled in every potted plant I could pick up or shove onto the dolly. The dining room and family room are populated with them. They’re not pleased with me for cheating them of their chance to soak up some unsalted, unchlorinated water, which is what falls out of our skies, so much superior to what barfs out of the tap. But it will rain again. This freeze will happen only once in the next four or five years. They will be glad to spend the next few nights indoors, those plants.
Gerardo came by with his 16-year-old son, one of those adolescents who starts to look like a young man before he can lift a can of beer to celebrate his new mustache. Wrestled the two surviving strings of old incandescent Christmas lights into the lime tree, in hopes of fending off a repeat of the dieback the last freeze dealt it three or four years ago. There really aren’t enough lights to do much good. We hung a shop light up in the middle of the canopy, too. Hope these will emanate enough heat to save most of the tree.
***
My neighbor Terri got a new air conditioner today. The AC dudes spent a third of the day, most of it in cold, pouring rain, wrestling the old unit off her roof and wrestling a new one on. It possesses a sterling new quality: QUIET! Yes. Last time I looked out there, it was humming softly to itself: quieter right outside my beloved west deck (the Leafy Bower) than the swimming pool motor. This is nice, very nice: in the past when Terri’s AC unit came on, the racket was enough to drive one inside. I hope it saves her as much on her bills as it does in noise relief!
***
Gerardo looked askance at the AC dudes. He refused to leave until he saw that I’d locked the security door on the garage’s west side, which the AC dudes could observe in action all the time he and his son were fooling around out there. {sigh} I’m afraid he’s becoming Americanized.
Gerardo emanates decency. He’s one of those men who revives your confidence in the human race. If you’ve ever traveled deep into Mexico, you’ve met a number of men and women like him: gracious, polite, and genuinely kind. I imagine when you live in a small village, it’s easy to see who’s morally challenged, and so one probably aspires to common decency. Whatever the cultural impetus, it seems to work. Gerardo makes me want to move to the Yucatán, whence he came.
When I first met Gerardo some years ago, he seemed preternaturally trusting. Naive, some of us might say. But alas, Candide takes instruction well, and now, even though with his friends he’s still his Old-World self, he doesn’t waste his goodwill on everyone anymore.
***
As we were untangling the strings of lights I’d heedlessly tossed into a box last winter, the mailman walked into the garage to deliver the first of the two pair of tights I’d bought to go with a couple of the tops captured in Monday’s bargain-hunting frenzy. These were the black Danskins.
They look great with the white Nygård tunic bearing the gaudy peony (or whatever it is) and good enough for government work with the long black knit top. The latter, I think, will be mostly for around-the-house; the former certainly fine for the grocery store and waypoints. But oh! They are so comfortable! Really, I didn’t want to take them off.
The style of wearing tights under a tunic, long a fatlady strategy, is probably passé—my daughter-in-sin, a chronic yo-yo dieter, used to affect this combination when she was feeling tubby. But gosh. Who cares? It makes me drop about 20 visual pounds! It’s far more comfortable than my usual uniform of Costco jeans and knit tops. And…mirabilis! These things don’t have to be ironed!
Quite a few other tunic-length tops reside in the closet, begging to be worn with them.
***
The American Express bill arrived too, along with the tights. Holy mackerel: $2,330!
What on earth happened to my $800 budget?
Well, $520 or so of that was paid by M’hijito, who bought a new dryer at Sears. We charged it on my card so I could get the AMEX kickback, and he instantly wrote me a check to cover it.
Then there was the down payment on the ottoman I’ve coveted at Crate & Barrel, which I planned to pay from diddle-it-away savings.
And the $450 for 2011 Delta Dental coverage. I have got to get my teeth cleaned! Been afraid to set foot in a dental office since my coverage lapsed last May. And I suspect I need at least two new crowns. There’s a waiting period…hope I can last through it! La Maya has a dentist whom she describes as the (hunky!) Dentist from Heaven, so as soon as his office opens after the New Year, I’ll try to get in.
The Times double-charged me again this month, one of those habits of hard-copy periodicals that tends to drive one away from subscriptions. Amazingly, they always contrive to do this in months when I’m already overcharged.
And, since none of this explains a $1,500 budget overrun, this was definitely an overcharge month!
At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail describes a kind of spending exhaustion. That’s exactly how I’m feeling, even though most of this month’s outrageous expenditures were really not extravagances but things that were truly needed. I feel the same way: would like to spend the next month in full frugal mode. Hold the bills, please!
Have you seen the delightful site called Today I Found Out? I literally stumbled across it, having finally gotten around to reinstalling the StumbleUpon toolbar after the late, great hard drive crash.
Check out this infographic about one of my favorite critters:
Is that or is it not a hoot? These funny strips are nestled in among conventionally written blog posts, each of them reporting some interesting or odd fact. As far as I can tell, every story comes with an extra payload of related and sometimes amazing factoids. Did you know that the “pull and pray” method is actually just about as effective as using condoms? Who’d’ve thunk it? Truth is, for the average Joe & Jane, rubbers are a great deal less effective than some of us have been known to hope.
Did you know the stuff inside an Etch-a-Sketch (one of my favorite toys when I was a little kid…and just freshly invented, as it develops, there in the Late Cretaceous) is extremely flammable? Bet you didn’t know what was inside it at all, didja? Or when sliced bread was illegal? Or who invented Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
This is an absurdly fun site for closet eggheads, the type who used to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the bathroom when not playing with their Etch-a-Sketches. Check it out!
What is it about basic organization that I seem incapable of mastering? I imagine I’ve kept careful records, I delude myself that four drawers full of carefully categorized file folders have organized every important piece of paper that comes into the house (and thousands of faintly important, maybe-important, and irrelevant pieces of paper). In my mind, it looks good…if sometimes cluttered. I am, in a word, organized!
Well, until someone asks me a direct question. Last night the new accountant e-mailed a few innocent queries.
No. 1. How much is your social security income before taxes and medicare deductions?
Uhm…not very much.
No. 2. How much is deducted for Federal and AZ taxes?
Too much?
No. 4. Did you receive a statement from the state of AZ showing the taxable amount of your sick pay? Were any taxes withheld?
You would think so. But if I did, I can’t find it. Yes, taxes were withheld. The only record I can find is notes on a telephone conversation with the lady who runs the RASL program.
No. 5. Please forward a copy of your latest MCCD pay stub. The one I have is dated 09/24/2010.
Okay. You do realize that through this entire semester, no two community college paychecks have been the same? Does that matter?
No. 6. How much was your Fidelity IRA distribution? Was it from a Roth or a regular IRA? Were any taxes withheld?
Who, what? Where, why? When?
No. 9. Are you getting a new A/C unit that will qualify for the tax credit?
Far as I can tell. The AC guy says it’s worth $1,500.
The only reason I could answer that last one is that the receipt is still sitting on my desk, yet to be filed.
Social Security totally flummoxes me. After they took away an entire month’s benefit check as punishment for my having committed the sin of earning a few bucks more than the earnings limitation, they turned around and announced they had recalculated my benefit and were raising it. I have never been told the dollar amount that is withheld for federal taxes, and as far as I know Arizona doesn’t tax Social Security. If it does, I don’t know how much or whether Social Security withholds state taxes. When I try to figure out what the gross must be, assuming they’re withholding 15% for federal tax and nothing for state tax and $110 for Medicare, I come up with a gross on the new “increase” that’s smaller than it should be if I were paid the original gross the entire year.
Such a vast flood of paper pours into my house that I’ve developed a flinch reflex about any form to fill out, any document from a threatening official agency such as the federal government or an insurance company, and most anything that requires a response from me. Every day I walk past the recycling bin coming in from the mailbox and dump everything that looks like advertising or pointlessness into the trash. The mailman delivers so much garbage that in a week the four-foot-high bin is half-full before I’ve tossed the newspapers and all the overwrapping that swaddles every product we buy.
That still leaves me with mounds of paper to have to sort through, try to understand, figure out what to do with, and file. Right now, after just a week, my desk and kitchen counter are covered with the stuff!
And file it I do. But once it’s filed in those tidy drawers, it’s effectively lost.
Oh god. Just writing about this is giving me another throat spasm. I’ve gotta get up, feed the hound, and go for a walk.
Is this REALLY necessary?
Image: Paper recycling in Ponte a Serraglio, Italy. By H005. Public domain.
Check out this lovely painting La Maya did yesterday at her mentor’s studio!
She calls it “Roses for Love.”
This is the time of year for roses in southern Arizona. The plants are so overjoyed to have survived another brutal summer, they burst forth in spectacular blooms. For some reason, the rose scent seems to be stronger during the fall than in the springtime. A variety of deep red rose that grows here has a hypnotic perfume.
La Maya has posted a number of new works since she started her own website. The still life has always been her forte, and she has done some very nice landscapes. The ones she’s got online right now picture the Imperial Valley and the high Arizona desert. I wish she still had the one she did when she and La Bethulia were in Spain—they came across an incredible field of lavender with mountains in the background. Somebody bought that piece instantly, and she’s never tried to reproduce it. It was gorgeous.
Recently she’s started to do some portraiture, too. That’s brave. I never have been able to draw or paint an acceptable image of a human being. That takes some talent.
