Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Glory at the end of a devilish day

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Dusk came in behind curtains of virga, otherworldly mauve in sunset’s banked furnace. In the distance, thunder, rumbling like bowling balls. Such an ugly day, today: 112 in the shade and muggy, so wet that even inside an air-conditioned box the water condenses on your face, you can’t tell the difference between air, water, and sweat and maybe there isn’t any. Difference, I mean, ou différance. So, so flicking hot.

The morning started with another little disaster. I stuck a piece of bacon in the microwave, set it to 35 seconds. So I thought. God only knows what I really entered in the punch-pad. Set the teakettle over the fire. Funny smell: figured the stove was dirty (damn it, another mess to clean up!), but it would burn off. Smell > stink. What? Where?

Where? In the microwave. Bacon carbonized, paper about to catch fire. Rescue, dump in sink, pour water over it. Stink expands to fill all space available, which happens to be the entire habitation in which I and the dog live.

Seven a.m. and it’s a hundred degrees out there. Shut off the air conditioning. Open all the doors and windows. Turn on every fan in the house as high as it will go.

Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Pray. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Pray again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…

Get the yellow stuff off the microwave’s interior surface, but figure all that scrubbing’s doing naught to get the stink out of the hidden interior parts.

Remember what happened when My Bartleby set fire to her lunch in the office microwave, ruining the microwave once and for all. Price range for replacement over-the range microwaves: $260 to $940. Tra la la! Who doesn’t have that laying around the house?

Hot literally, hot metaphorically. In this endless day nothing goes right. Blackboard, the electronic infrastructure that’s supposed to enhance and simplify the delivery of our courses, went down the instant classes started. Yes. After all those weeks and months of building extravagant, magnificent, elegant courses for our students, the damn thing is down. And it’s not coming up. So much work, so many hours and days and weeks of toil in the hot, hot summer: down the toilet.

Let’s heat it up some more, at the local level: my iMac’s hard drive crashes. It will take $209 to get the damn thing running again. My students can’t get online, and neither can I.

IT to college community:

Update: 8/24/2010 – 7:30 pm

Dear Faculty and Students:

MCCCD and Blackboard teams met again at 5:00 pm this evening to continue working through the connectivity and performance issues. Although additional changes were made throughout the afternoon, we regret to inform you that nothing significant has changed and the connectivity/performance issues continue.

Blackboard will continue with diagnostics and monitoring throughout the evening with 2 hour updates to MCCCD. MCCCD and Blackboard will again convene, via conference call, at 7:00 am in the morning. We will send another update to you as soon as that call completes.

I hunger. Bowling balls in the sky warn against firing up a barbecue, but I want a steak. I do not want to clean more grease off the stovetop. So instead I fire up the broiler, 112 degrees in the shade notwithstanding. What can it matter if the kitchen is a few degrees hotter?

Cooking a steak under an electric oven’s broiler is not unlike microwaving it. Even if you top it with butter, it still comes out gray all over. Oh well. It tasted pretty good.

Hot, so hot. Decide to risk a lightning bolt and dive into the pool. Haul out, cooled down enough to walk the dog. But nooo….

Like popcorn, drops of rain bounce against the patio roof. Slow popping at first, and then a magical frantic rattle. Rain! Actual desert rain.

The desert smells like rain, dust and creosote perfuming the air. Sweet. Finally, sweet.

I do not think God has a gender. She is not a He and He is not a She, though if forced to choose, I’d lean toward She, that being compatible with my subjective point of view. But what He or She invents hideous parasites to torment Its creations? For that matter, what kind of He or She thinks up a mosquito?

Whatever It is, It’s capable of putting on quite a lovely, scented show at the end of a day, a show that turns the day from hideous to tolerable. More than tolerable.

Yesterday, I managed to get through the various local crises fairly calmly. Three months of work on my courses down the tubes. A $2,000 computer melted down. Oh well!

But by midmorning today, I was showing signs of my own melt-down. Not being able to get the boxed computer onto a luggage dolly (to cart it up five stories to the repairman’s office) without causing the dolly to fall apart…that one just about did me in. Freaking flat broke and looking at $210 to fix the computer, $500± to replace the microwave, three months of work down the tubes, 26 students wondering what to do in the absence of course materials, a concentrated 8-week composition course to rewrite right now for no extra pay, no clue how to sell ad space for the Bach Festival program and a deadline of mid-September, a $500 drawdown from Fidelity reduced to 77 cents this month after I told the dude four times not to cut it until the September payment, and—oh, why not?—a white ring on the Stickley side table after a glass sweated water condensation all over it.

Rain is angels weeping.

Dumb Tax: Monster Morning!

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Grill, inside-out

Yesterday, after an amazingly hectic day during which I fell off the wagon big time (a glass of wine and two beers!!!), I tumbled into the sack around 10:00 p.m. Weary of awaking at 3:00 a.m., as had happened again in the wee hours of yesterday morning, I dropped an antihistamine hoping to drug myself so as to sleep through the night.

It worked. Didn’t wake up until six.

Stumbled outside to wring out  the dog in the backyard, there to find…a soggy, soggy landscape.

It must have rained all night long. Eighty degrees and the air was just wet. Thick with humidity.

The dog, no fool, refuses to go out. So I have to walk out into the yard trying to coax her (unsuccessfully) to visit the doggy loo. That’s when I notice that…oh yes…

Last night after I marinated and grilled the pound of awe-inspiring prawns I’d nabbed at Costco, I left the grill lid open so the perforated pan that held the shrimp would cool enough for me to wash it. Then, in my exhaustion (not to say inebriation), I totally spaced that I’d done that.

Even when, right before bedtime, I went to let the dog out and found it sprinkling, I failed to recall that the grill was hanging open to the evening skies.

Well.

You never saw such a mess in your entire put-together! The drip pan under the burners was overflowing with rainwater and grease. The cast-iron grates, highly rustable, were dripping greasy water into the interior of the grill. Formerly burned-on grease had somehow absorbed water and swelled up into blobs, like greasy puffed wheat. The ignition knob was soaked, as was every other part of the $400 grill. You could hear the meat-eating ants singing, a little squeaky ant chorus, as they danced a jig of joy around the perimeter of Ant City, knowing all this grease was spread across the earth for them to carry home. A gift, no doubt, from the Ant Goddess.

Two hours later…sweat was dripping into my eyes and off the end of my nose, I was drenched with sweat from top to bottom, my shoes were ruined from greasy water and detergent splashing on them, my hands were a wreck (the rubber gloves having died in the last fiasco I had to deal with), and yesterday’s $50 hairstyle was a sad memory.

And the pool was still full of leaves and devil pods.

To enhance the joy of that challenge, the pool needed to be backwashed. The filter was so clogged, the pump couldn’t push water fast enough to mound the leaves and seed pods into discrete piles so they could be sucked up by the hose bonnet. No way Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner could manage all those devil pods: they would choke him to death before he could get halfway across the deep end.

And for more joy enhancement: I shock-treated the pool yesterday, turning it into a puddle of Clorox. This meant I couldn’t even dive into the water this morning to cool off from the hard labor.

Backwashed the pool into the alley, hoping the neighbors would imagine the resulting lake came from the rain. Fortunately, most people don’t go out and about in swampy weather like this.

Recharged the filter. Let the pump run while I fed the dog and…and…yes. Cleaned up the little gift she left under the table, since she wouldn’t go outside into the soggy soggy landscape. Fixed and ate breakfast (mostly coffee, annoyingly decaffeinated). Plodded back out to clean the pool.

The hose bonnet is one of the great unsung inventions of humankind. It vacuumed up about a half bushel of leaves and devil pods. Matter of fact, it cleaned the bottom so well, there was no need to put Harvey back into the pool. Which was good, because he’s allergic to hyperchlorination and shouldn’t be crawling around in there until a shock treatment has dissipated.

Jumped in the pool in spite of the no-no levels of carcinogenic chlorine guaranteed to rot away Harvey’s plastic carapace. This left the skin stinging. Stood under the hot shower for god knows how long, soaking and soaping chemicals off.

The barbecue is now so clean it’s almost good as new. The pool pump is running so efficiently it’s almost silent in its operation.

It is almost noon. And I am going back to bed.

Charging Costs to Your In-Home Business

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So over at the Depot I got these nifty (read “cheap”) motion-sensitive coach lights for the front of the house. Yesterday Dave the Electrician came over, hard-wired them, and got them working right. The equally cheap nifty lights I installed when I moved in here five years ago are crumbling away under the radioactive Arizona sunlight.

But more to the point, the  house has been rewired by some moronic former owner so that two of the three lights in front have to be turned on from inside the garage. When the house was built, one switch next to the front door turned them all on. Why anyone would change this escapes me. I suspect it was Satan and Proserpine‘s idea. “Green” was their affectation, and one way they liked to manifest that was with few and dim lights. As long as he was dorking with the electric (for reasons unknown, Satan imagined he was a great electrical handyman) (don’t ask about the DIY 220-volt outlet!), he probably figured he could save electricity by wiring two of the lights into the garage, thereby allowing him to turn on only one light to cut down lawsuits from evening guests tripping over the threshold.

Which brings us to the day’s point: Can I get away with having the S-corporation pay for the new fixtures?

I believe I can. Here’s why:

1. The office, which has a hardened lock on a solid-core door, is now accessible by burglars only through a front window. This window is lighted solely by the front lights. The nearest street lamp is on the other side of the house, and the trees in the front yard shelter the office window from easy view. Thus at night access to the office is facilitated by darkness.

2. The only things of value in the building are inside the office, which, in my absence, is otherwise locked behind a contraption designed to break a burglar’s drill bit—or his foot, should he try to kick his way in.

• I have no jewelry of any note. My baubles by and large come from the craft store.
• The sound system is an ancient stereo that no one would pay money for today.
• The television is an old TV/computer monitor my son had in San Francisco, tiny and antique. At a yard sale it would bring about ten bucks.
• The furniture is 50 years old. It does not qualify as “antique.” It qualifies as “used furniture.”

3. Besides the fact that the only marketable goods in the house are inside the office, the entire value of my business consists of the data stored on its computer, external hard drive, and flash drives. The very existence of the S-corp would be put at risk if someone came in the office’s window and cleaned out all the electronic gear.

4. The neighborhood is under siege from burglars and home invaders. I can prove this by the constant stream of alerts, warnings, and reports from the police and the head of the neighborhood association.

5. Therefore, installing security lights on the front of the house is crucial to maintaining the security and integrity of the business.

These little lights, which probably will last about as long as the crumbling cheapies they replaced, are great. If anybody comes up to the front of the house, they pop on, so that I can look out a window and actually see who or what is out there.

In the previous regime, if I heard something in the night I could only turn on one light, which did not illuminate the courtyard. There’s no way I’m going to walk into the garage to turn on the other two lights, not if there’s even the remotest possibility that someone’s prowling around outside. The garage has a side door. Even though I put a security door over it, I have to go in and out that side very morning to water the plants, and half the time I forget to flip the deadbolt shut when I come back in. Sometimes I re-enter the house through the back door and forget to close the security door altogether. So, in the middle of the night, opening the door from the kitchen to the garage is an invitation for the burglar to come right in.

Lights that come on automatically if there’s anyone sneaking around out there will allow me to see the person and call 911. And they should deter burglars from breaking in the office window when I’m out.

I like these, because they’re open on the bottom, allowing me to change the bulb without having to deconstruct the whole fixture. Amazon has a cheaper motion-sensitive coach light, but you have to take it apart to change the bulb. That entails work, which goes against my principles.

Now, while it’s true that the new fixtures light the residential part of the house as well as the room devoted to the office, the fact is the only things of any value inside the house are in the office, and if those things are lost, the corporation goes bust. So, I think it’s reasonable to argue that the fixtures can be expensed through the corporation.

Wake up from that dream!

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So a couple of readers pointed out that something was wrong with the math that suggested I just might manage an apartment in San Francisco for myself, if and when M’hijito makes his escape from Phoenix. Dead right: the problem was that the figure I was using for the 4% and 5% drawdowns, which I had lifted from another column, actually represented the drawdowns plus Social Security. Having blithely forgotten that small detail, I added Social Security in on top of those, for a net income whose optimism exceeded rosey.

Remove the extra Social Security contribution and you get figures that look like these:

Even if I could find a comfortable place for $2,000 a month—a highly unlikely proposition—nothing even vaguely like enough to live on would remain after the inescapable costs. Realistically, I’m finding that I can’t get by with much less than $700 for monthly discretionary expenses, because there’s always some repair bill or unexpected cost to be paid. Even if I put nothing into the monthly diddle-it-away fund (from which I buy clothing, an item that I really can’t do without…especially in San Francisco ;-)), there’s simply  not enough left after rent, health insurance, long-term care insurance, and utilities.

And the fact is that even in the make-believe scenario, my figures didn’t take into account the higher tax rates, nor did they anticipate the inevitability that rents will increase when the economy improves and demand for housing increases. Right now, rents are low in the City, but as soon as commerce heats up and more people migrate to San Francisco, landlords raise their rent rates accordingly.

As for moving to some other venue in California: really, there’s no place else in that state that I want to live. San Francisco has a special allure—it’s a one-of-a-kind city. But the whole state is overrun with people, most of them living in Southern California-style ticky-tacky. I already live in Southern California East; why would I want to spend more to live in the same conditions there?

I guess if M’hijito moves back to San Francisco, I’ll just decamp to Prescott, which at least is a little cooler than the Valley. It used to be a little more urbane, too, in a funny way, a little more resident-friendly—but that’s less so today.

California Dreamin’

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LOL! Check out the comments, below, especially from Deflating Dreams. 😀 English-major math strikes again! Gotta race to meetings just now, but will be back with an update.

Could I afford to live in San Francisco? Offhand, you’d think the answer would be no way, eh?

Well.

M’hijito is angling to get himself into a master’s program that would train him to be a physician’s assistant. Pay for such work is passing decent…good enough to get him back to San Francisco, where he craves to live. If he takes off for the Bay Area again, there won’t be so much reason for me to hang around this big old expensive house in a city not likely to shake off its economic depression any time in the near future.

Yeah, I know: California’s economy is in bad trouble, too. But Arizona’s nasty little secret is that we’re even worse off than California, second only to Michigan in unemployment. and thanks to the demagogues in the legislature, we’ve shot ourselves in the economic foot with SB 1070. That actually isn’t the half of it, to tell the truth. Arizona, I’m afraid, is about worn out as a place to live, certainly for anyone who aspires to the middle class.

I’d be sorry to leave the choir…but frankly, San Francisco has plenty of high Episcopal churches; surely one of them has a decent choir. And I really would regret leaving my best friends behind. But still, it’s something to think about. Blood being thicker than water, after all.

Let’s suppose I could sell my house and clear two hundred grand on it. Remains to be seen: prices are below pre-bubble prices here, but it’s a nice house in the quietest part of the neighborhood, and just this minute no obviously run-down houses directly abut it.

And let’s suppose M’hijito and I can unload the downtown house with a loss of no more than $52,000. I dispose of all but the most basic of my possessions, so it takes about $3,000 to move me up to the City. I’m left with net cash and retirement savings of $653,810. Not counting the remaining $10,000 of RASL supposedly coming my way, or the $14,000 emergency fund in the bank.

A 4 percent annual drawdown from this nest egg would come to $41,153; 5 percent would yield $47,690. My financial advisor says I have more than enough to last the rest of my life, even at a 6 percent drawdown, though that’s something I view with skepticism. So let’s work with 4 percent and 5 percent; add $15,000 of Social Security to those and you get a gross income ranging from $56,153 to $62,690. Subtract 23 percent for taxes, and you get a net of $42,237 to $48,270.

That just might provide enough to pay rent and buy food. Let’s check it out…

For the 4 percent drawdown, I posit a rent of $2,000 a month, which would get me into a studio or maybe a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco proper. If we subtract that rent from net monthly income and then deduct the expenses I can’t get out of—Medicare Part D, Medigap, and long-term care insurance—and then we subtract the estimated costs of utilities, does enough remain to live on?

That’s fifty bucks more than than I allow myself now!

Realistically, one isn’t likely to find a good apartment in San Francisco for much less than $2,500. That would require a larger drawdown from savings. At 5 percent with a $2,500 rent payment:

Think of that! I could probably do it. The place where I want to live includes basic cable service, so I might be able to engineer the DSL and phone through that. And given that most months I don’t spend $800, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there’s enough play to cover unexpected expenses.

And that’s without any side income: no teaching gigs, no freelance assignments, no blog income.

It will take M’hijito two or three years to pick up the undergraduate requirements for a science degree and then get through the master’s. By then I will have established myself as the master of online courses at Paradise Valley Community College. If they’ll let me keep on teaching online no matter where I live, just that little bit of extra change would keep me quite comfortable in San Francisco.

And I know exactly where I want to live: in a historic national park. Yes. The San Francisco Presidio, an old military base, has been converted into a sprawling residential area, run by the National Parks Service. I would kill to live at the Presidio! O… M… G… I’ve loved that place since I was 12 years old!

The section called the Quarry has single-story two-bedroom apartments, wheelchair-accessible, for $2,425. The interiors are a bit on the military side, but with some adept decorating you could make it pleasant enough.

On Ruckman Avenue, you can rent in one of these places, with hardwood floors, remodeled kitchen, enclosed sunporches or verandas… A one-bedroom is $1,795, but the site says the apartments have basements, which presumably would give you room for office space or storage.

To die for. The Sanches neighborhood has two-bedroom apartments for $2,350. They look like regular old apartment buildings. But the price is right, and so is the size.

I dunno. I’d probably sacrifice size for charm, given a choice. The area where I’d really like to live is Baker Beach: $1,795 for a two-bedroom; and even a three-bedroom for $2,100. It’s directly across the street from the ocean, and the interiors are much nicer than any of the other affordable places. Unfortunately, they won’t let me keep Cassie in that part of the park, so that’s out.

Interestingly, you can get an employee’s discount if you work for any of the businesses on the grounds. So presumably once you got there, you could get in line to be considered for any openings that you could weasel your way into, thereby cutting the rent nicely.

In theory, if you lived in San Francisco you could probably dispense with the car. But I think out in the Presidio, you probably would need one. The Dog Chariot is a little big to maneuver in the City…but one could replace it with a Smart Car. The price is about what I’d get for my aging Sienna.

Boyoboy.

Get that degree, son, while I still have enough life in me to enjoy San Francisco!

In which I embrace my inner White Trash

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Daddy passed for white. Mommy with her Huguenot ancestry and her DAR grandmother was as European as they come. So I reckon I can pass, too.

Last night my long-neglected White Trash roots sprouted a sucker: tinfoil window covering.

Beautiful! An exquisite decorator touch. Eat your heart out, Martha! And Sarah, y’all come on over for coffee now, hear?

How do you like it? Ain’t it purty?

Yep. Tinfoil and Scotch tape: Early Hillwilliam. Sooo…. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is I’m getting might’ tired of waking up at 4:30 in the morning after five hours (at best!) of sleep. Especially when I keep reading those studies that claim old bats who sleep less than seven hours each night are at elevated risk of heart attack. These four-hour nights have been going on way, way too long. They leave me sick with exhaustion, and even if I get a decent night’s sleep it takes two nights of rest to start to feel normal. Two full nights’ sleep in a row is a rarity scarce as hen’s teeth.

Meditating on this state of affairs, it occurred to me that the problem has to do with the light that seeps in through the curtains every morning. For years, I’ve awakened at dawn. The first pearly predawn light works just like an alarm clock. The curtains on the bedroom Arcadia door, at the outset pretty skimpy, are made of beige coarsely woven fabric. Even though they’re lined, they don’t block much light, and since they barely cover the window, plenty of light pours in around the edges.

What if I could block early-morning light from getting into the bedroom? Maybe I could build curtains of outdoor fabric and hang them on the outside of the doors, adding a light- and heat-blocking layer on the exterior side of the perennially overheated glass. Combined with darker drapes on the inside, that might do the trick.

Actually, the curtain-rod hangers in there accommodate two rods, so I could in theory hang two pairs of curtains on the interior. The proposed exterior drapes would then create not one, not two, but three layers of fabric. Hm.

Well, before I go to the trouble and expense of making three sets of drapery and drilling holes in the exterior masonry to hang tacky-looking curtain rods, I figure I’d better find out whether this theory works. Hence, a little experiment.

Research question: Would a dawn-sensitive subject sleep a full seven hours if no light could penetrate the sleeping chamber?

Research methodology: Plaster the windows with tinfoil and then try to sleep through the night.

Preliminary results: Well, the subject did sleep seven hours last night. Nodded off around quarter to eleven and woke up at quarter to six.

Discussion: This, of course, doesn’t prove a thing. Now and again, I do sleep seven hours, and last night in spite of an hour-long afternoon siesta, I was dead tired. But there’s nothing (other than aesthetic queasiness) to keep me from leaving the tinfoil décor up for a few more nights.

So, the plan now is to wait and see. If, over the next week or so, I find I can sleep all night long in a room plunged into inky darkness, then by all means I’ll put up fuller, darker drapes on the inside. And maybe even build some exterior drapes, though it escapes me how these would be secured in the gale-force winds of monsoon season.

In between times, pass the moonshine. And why don’t y’all join me and Sarah here at the manse for some grits and coffee?

Image: Hillbilly Hot Dogs, State Route 2, West Virginia. Youngamerican. GNU Free Documentation License.

What do you reckon they’re doing with them hanging plants? My daddy would never in a million years have put up with them things, pullin’ the eaves down. Not unless they’re plastic, so’s you don’t have to water ’em.