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.
w00t! Yesterday was the last day of class!Would that I could raise a toast to it!
Two rafts of papers to read, two courses to post on Blackboard, and then with any luck at all an entire month’s break.
I got a head start on the magazine writing students’ papers yesterday. Today I’ll read the Little McBoingers’ freshman comp papers (what a bunch this class has been!), then finish the budding journalists’ papers on Saturday. With any luck, I’ll be ready to file grades by…what? Monday? Then a day or two to load next semester’s courses, and after that…waHOO! A whole month of freedom!
This is the first real, credible vacation I’ve had in six years. Despite my highly developed expertise in Creative Malingering, the fact is that while “telecommuting” I was reading arcane academic copy steadily, plus supervising three or four bright young editors from afar (and doing freelance copyediting, and noonlighting with one to four upper-division writing courses on the side, and running this blog). Before that, when I was on GDU’s teaching faculty, an occasional break would come up, but it was usually filled with unpaid course prep work. I would grab every summer course I could get, and the time in between was occupied with getting ready for the next round of courses.
Boy, do I need a break! The stress of working 12 to 17 hours a day while trying to make some very frayed ends meet plus worrying about what we’re going to do, if anything, about the underwater house is making me sick. It’s obvious that the belly thing is stress-related, plus I’ve developed a fantastic new hypochondria, highly annoying and distracting. What next, Lord?
Of course, this “break” will be blighted a bit by the Workman Waltz, an added round of hassle one could do without. In addition to the roofers and the AC guy, I need to get the plumber in here. The kitchen sink is backing up in a weird way…think something’s amiss with the garbage disposal. While he’s here, there are a bunch of honey-does he can attend to.
That notwithstanding, I have a vacation plan. Mostly, it entails finally getting back into a healthy exercise routine. The scheme is as follows:
• Walk the dog first thing in the morning. • Later in the morning, walk in one of the mountain parks, probably the one in Glendale, which is cleaner and more pleasant than ours and whose proprietors have announced no plans to fleece the users with parking fees. • Ride the wonderful new purple bike in the afternoon. • Walk the dog again in the evening. • Spend the time in between gardening, touching up the paint, and reading stuff that is pure froth.
Maybe I can even get some socializing in somehow. That, of course, would entail finding someone to socialize with, not a likely prospect. But at least choir will be doing a lot of singing over the holidays, so that’ll provide some human contact. I’m going to spend Christmas Day at SDXB’s—with M’hijito at his dad’s and New Girlfriend in Denver with her family, we’ll both be orphaned again. Our plan is to hike part of the day and then fix a swell dinner.
So, maybe with some relief from work and a stab at getting back into what was once a pretty typical exercise routine, I’ll start to feel normal again.
Images:
Nikolai Petrovitch Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Calculations. Public Domain.
Funny about Money, Snapshot of Purple Bicycle. You want that photo? Feel free!
Evan, our favorite conservative and proprietor of My Journey to Millions, is a father! The Wife brought a baby boy into the world, and Evan lived to tell the story. Congratulations, Evan.
If you’d like to celebrate the arrival, consider subscribing to LoveDrop, a micro-giving group that engineers monthly gifts to needy individuals and families. For as little as a dollar a month, you can join a community whose founders include Budgets Are Sexy founder J. Money, obviously a high recommendation. Do be aware that it’s not a 501(c)3 charity; it’s a for-profit group dedicated to doing good works. Fifty percent of revenues go to recipients, 20 percent to taxes, and 30 percent to operating costs. Given that the group has to pay taxes (unlike traditional charities), this is a very good ratio.
Pour moi, I don’t know. I occupy a four-bedroom house. It’s a little loose for me, but at 1,680 square feet, it’s not so huge I want to get free of it. One of the bedrooms is devoted to storage—it holds a freezer that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen; the closet holds linens that won’t fit in the linen closet, some art and sewing supplies, during the summer the space heaters, and during the winter the fans. A wallful of old bookcases holds food staples that won’t fit in the kitchen pantry and shouldn’t be stored in 115-degree heat in the garage. Another bedroom holds my office, file storage, and office supplies; I spend most of my waking hours here, operating not one, not two, but three enterprises. The master bedroom is just another closet—none of these rooms is very large—but I can’t imagine doing without it.
I could, however, do without the bedroom that’s occupied by the television, since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Last night I sat down to veg out while writing a post for another site and found the offerings so bad, with all four channels of NPR begging for money and just garbage on all the other stations, that it didn’t even suffice as background noise.
And I could live without two bathrooms. And the extra living room that is the “family room.” That would cut about 470 square feet off my present space, bringing the desired living space down to about 1,210 square feet.
The underwater downtown house is about 1,300 square feet, to my mind just about ideal for one person. The kitchen is large enough to function. The dining room is big enough to entertain friends. The living room will hold an overstuffed sofa and chair (nonnegotiables, in my book); one of the bedrooms has plenty of space for an office, one is roomy enough for a queen-sized bed or maybe even a king; and the little back room will do for extra storage or as a guest room or sitting room.
What bothers me about Jay’s minidigs, besides the fact that you’d have to be pathologically tidy to live there, is the loft bedroom. It’s a firetrap. Get a fire started below you—propane is wildly flammable—and you’re dead. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get out of there. Check out that teeny little window: cute, but a grown man couldn’t begin to fit through it. And if he did, where would be be? Over the top of a flaming porch?
HUH-uh. Don’t think we’ll be contemplating life by Walden Pond in that thing.
Now the one in Texas that Mary photographed looks more reasonable. The bedroom is on the ground floor (there doesn’t appear to be a second floor). With some exuberant downsizing, you could indeed fit inside that place. At least, one person could. Two might be a little tight. Personally, I’d like more kitchen space—I cook a lot, and I’m not seeing enough space there for someone who likes to cook and likes to eat.
It’s a perfect little guest house or vacation getaway. As Mary points out, to make it permanently livable it would be good to have a place for a washer and dryer (or a washer alone…you hardly need a dryer, at least in a warm climate). For the $45,000 Mary’s friend paid to install this on her lot, you might be able to get an ordinary manufactured home in a park model; Cavco is selling them for around $49,000. Clayton claims to build a three-bedroom mobile home for as little as 49 grand…but who knows what you really get for that.
For not very much more that $45,000, I suspect you could get enough space that you wouldn’t have to ponder whether you really could live in it. You’d need to buy a plot of land, of course…there’s the rub! But if you already have one, this would be an inexpensive way to build on it.
