What are the silliest things you’ve ever done where money was concerned?
Me, I don’t know that I could count them all. The alliterative “seven” is definitely too few to cover all the bizarre money tricks I’ve pulled over the course of a lifetime. Some were risks I shouldn’t have taken. Some were the result of laziness or inertia. Some were miscalculations or the long-term outcome of misunderstanding. Some were just flicking stupid. In at least one case, better minds than mine made the same error. Here are my Top Seven Silly Stunts:
7. Spent $100 on a lottery ticket for a charitable cause.
6.Spent way too much on fix-up of various houses.
5. Majored in French because the chair of the French department told me, then a 17-year-old freshman, that I wouldn’t have to waste my time in beginning language courses if I would declare myself a French major (at the time I had no idea this amounted to a financial decision!).
4. Walked from a free ride to graduate school because I was depressed over breaking up with a boyfriend.
3. Later, did the same damn-fool thing again, this time to get married.
2. Failed to anticipate the Great Recession but instead proceeded as though good times would roll forever.
1. Failed to seek a teaching job in the much better paying-community colleges but instead, out of inertia, remained in a comparable but ill-paid job at the Great Desert University.
Well, the power and water bills showed up at once yesterday. Not too bad: the electric was only $176.63 The water came in a dollar over budget at $126.42, but at least it didn’t out-zing than the power bill, as it did last month.
When it gets to be over 100 degrees, you have to water the potted plants every day. The roses, of which I have way too many, also need to be watered several times a week. And ohhh yeah: yesterday’s water bill also reflects the day I forgot and left the water running in the pool! Dumb tax!
So far, we’ve had a pretty temperate summer…only one 115-degree day. Now, though, we’re headed into monsoon season. At 5:30 this morning it was 90 degrees out there, and overcast. The air conditioning was roaring away when I awoke…had to jack it up to 85 to settle it down. Yuck. It’s hot and wet outdoors. This is the only really uncomfortable season in Arizona, and it will last through to the end of August.
That means the really big power bill is yet to come. The $175 is for June, a relatively cool month. The 115-degree day, when the A.C. thumped along alllll daayyyyyy long almost without stopping, occurred in July. The bill for that (and for most of the really hot and humid days) won’t come until next month. The past few days have seen the shaded back-porch thermometer at 110, and the unit has been running pretty much continuously all day long, except in the morning, when I shut it off until I can’t stand the heat any longer.
By comparison, last July’s power bill was $165.78, ten bucks less than this month’s gouge. Salt River Project, our power provider, has jacked up its rates. I forget exactly how much they managed to wangle out of the corporation commission. They tried to get an increase of 8.8%, but as I recall they dropped it, in the face of shrieks from customers, to 4.9%. That would’ve raised this year’s July bill to $174. Since I’ve kept the temps around 85 during the day—it has to go down to 78 or 80 at night, or I can’t sleep at all—that means that even at uncomfortable temps the power bill continues to move toward unaffordable.
There’s no way to compare the water bill with last year’s, because the City of Phoenix screwed up the billing by canceling my service when someone gave them the wrong address to close out their own service. In July 2008, I had a $127 water bill. I wouldn’t be surprised but what the actual bill in 2010 was somewhere near that. In January the City also jacked up its rates, by 7.2% (!). I expect the fact that this month’s bill didn’t rise to $136, even after I almost overflowed the pool one fine day, reflects the savings realized from cutting down the endlessly thirsty, moribund ash tree.
Despite my intermittent bitching about it, the pool has earned its keep this year.
Earlier this season, I discovered that ten or fifteen minutes of paddling around in the pool really made the sore arm feel better. A lot better. So lately I’ve been setting the kitchen timer to go off every two hours, to force myself to get up off my duff and drop into the pool. While the injury is not healed and probably never will fully heal, it certainly is much improved. At least I’m not waking up in acute pain every morning, and I can now move the arm into most positions where it needs to go without too sharp a jab.
This has led me to rediscover what I’d long ago forgotten: the way I managed to keep the power bills down in the gigantic, leaky house my ex- and I occupied was by staying wet all day. I used to shut off the AC the minute the man walked out of the house, and it would stay off until around 5:00 p.m.; because he got home around 6:30, the house would be cool by the time he came in from work. This was tolerable for me because I would run out to the pool about once an hour. In those days, I wore a swim suit and my hair hung down to my shoulders, and so my clothes and hair were damp almost all the time.
And that’s how you survive two months of 110-degree weather without bankrupting yourself. 😉
Image: Filamentary plasma in the sun’s chromosphere. NASA. Public domain.
Some of you will recall my recent enthusiasm, now a few months old, to renovate the aging face, which was beginning to show the signs one might expect in a survivor of the Pleistocene.
After a fiasco with a product called RoC, I ordered up some Alpha Hydrox AHA Enhanced Lotion from the Internet. This old favorite has about the same concentration of alpha-hydroxy acid as the expensive stuff my dermatologist used to dispense, at a tiny fraction of the cost. The plan was to try to plump out some of the wrinkles and fade the age spots a bit, and then to disguise what remained with liberal application of new-fangled powder mineral makeup.
So, did any of these shenanigans do any good? Well, judge for yourself. Here’s a before:
A bit blurry, but probably just as well. Some things are best not studied with excessive acuity.
Now here’s the after:
Doctored and painted!
Definitely not going to win any beauty contests. But I think it’s better. The hide looks healthier, and the splotches and uneven coloring are smoothed out.
The keys were twice-daily application of Alpha Hydrox (which I could only find at Amazon.com) and various ordinary drugstore face creams or hand lotions; daily application of a sunscreen; weekly exfoliation with plain old baking soda, and artful painting with Kirkland Borghese mineral makeup.
Naturally, sensing that I liked the stuff Costco immediately took the makeup off the shelf. It appears to be out of production altogether—you can’t get it online, either, nor, apparently, can you buy it from Borghese. After traipsing to three Costco outlets, I finally found a few in one store, where I bought two sets for the cost of one small jar of powder from The Body Shop. When it runs out, I guess I’ll try L’Oréal, which is the drugstore version of Lancôme.
Benign sunscreen
Considering that it’s been barely four months since I started this regimen (not to say “experiment,”), the results are not bad. No doubt if I keep it up, by the time I’m 70 I’ll look like I’m 18.
Have you noticed that? Not only will things always go wrong, they conspire to do so at impossible times.
It is Friday before the Fourth of July weekend. At 5:15 in the morning, I awake in a stupor to the sound of the air-conditioning pounding away.
Grope for my $720 glasses. Can’t find them.
Lift the dog off the bed, let her out, shut off the AC, stumble to the bathroom. Sitting there I think…huh? The seat here sure is warm. Thass odd. I turn the thermostat down at night so I can sleep, then turn it up to 85 in the day. But just now it’s only barely day. By the gray light of early dawn, the thermometer on the back porch reads 98 degrees.
Stumble back into the bedroom. Search for my glasses. Can’t find them.
Bloody hot in here. Stumble into the hall. Thermostat says 82, but it’s set for 78. Shit. That means the AC’s on the fritz.
$ $ $ $ $
Speaking of $$, I still haven’t found the glasses. Search all over the house. Can’t find them.
Finally take the bed apart. Find them under the covers. Miraculously I was so tired I didn’t move last night and so never rolled over on top of them.
Check e-mail. Message from Apple: that worthy corporation’s mail & server account has come due. That’ll be $100 for service I can get free from Apple’s competition. But everyone I know has that address. Do I really want to deep-six it?
Probably not.
My radically reduced budget is already about shot. I really need an air-conditioning bill and an exorbitant bill for Cadillac e-mail service to come up in the same month.
That’s not all. I’m sitting here and realize the traffic ticket that came to me after my son was snapped by the traffic cam in the speed trap on State Route 51 said the registration on the car comes due this month. In Arizona, the cost of registering your car is exorbitant. Although it drops as the car ages, it’s still gunna be a $100 bill, plus another $30 for the emissions testing rip-off: a $130 whap upside the head.
Three expensive, unavoidable hits in freaking JULY, including an air-conditioning service call on a holiday weekend (!), at a time when power bills are through the roof, water bills are through the roof, gasoline prices are through the roof, and I have no income.
So, after another long and amazingly workful day, I poured a tall bourbon & water to go with the (pretty remarkable!) spaghetti dinner I whipped up for myself. But could only get around half of it. Needing to take the dog for a walk, I stuck the rest of it in the freezer, thinking that after we got home, I could pour some very cold booze into a plastic cup and enjoy it while floating around the pool.
It was off to the park for some serious sniffing of doggy perfumes and then a tour around our corner of Richistan to admire the way our betters live. Back to the house to toss together a mess of beans with onion, celery, herbs, tomato sauce, and the dregs of a ten-days-open bottle of wine.
Finally, at last, it’s time to pull the chilled highball out of the fridge and head for the pool.
Chilled is an understatement. Booze iceberg, that’s what we had. Alas, I didn’t think of photographing it while it wouldn’t budge out of the upside-down glass. Here it’s mostly defrosted. But you get the general idea.
Who knew alcohol would form a boozicle? Next time I’ll drop a popsicle stick in the glass and have a handy little treat for nocturnal pool floating. 😉
Midnight. It’s been a long day and a rough evening.Finish working around 11 p.m. but don’t feel like going to bed so am cruising the Web, wasting time into the wee hours.
Doesn’t sound very auspicious, does it?
Well. No, it wasn’t. Closing in on one in the morning, I decide to shut down the computer. It’s running slower and slower, and besides, I can’t keep my eyes open much longer. Too many programs are up, so I’m closing Excel and Word and Acrobat Professional (where did that come from?) and Grab and Preview and iPhoto and Firefox… and… all of a sudden the iMac has a Big Mac Attack!
Suddenly the screen is bloated like it ate too many Big Macs, and it squiggles around when I move the mouse. The mouse being tireder than I am, its scroll wheel doesn’t work and for a while I can’t get any response to any clicks.
Finally it starts to function but the fat screen is still bobbing around, waltzing to the rodent’s tune. Shut down. Reboot. No difference.
Shut down. Unplug. Wait for awhile. {it’s getting later and later…} Reboot. No improvement.
Now I’m thinking
a) what is this? The behavior is so weird I don’t even know what it’s called! and b) godammit, now on top of the two meetings and lunch tomorrow (which is not tomorrow but actually now only a few hours later today) I’m going to have to tote this machine into the Apple store and what is that going to cost me and why do these things invariably happen when i’m broke and the damn pool equipment is broke, too?????
Shut down and figure I’d better go to bed, and then I think uh oh! When did I back all that trash up, anyway?
Boot back up. Time passes. Hours, I’m sure. The machine reboots sloooooowwwwlleeeeeeeee. Finally everything comes back up. Save three vast directories to the external hard drive. More hours pass, or so it seems. Long, very very long minutes, anyway.
As the world turns, I think…there’s gotta be a way. So, google enlarged + screen + moving. Hey. What else do I have to do at two in the morning?
Mirabilis! This delightful site comes up! About two years ago, the Design Watchdog encountered the same problem with her Mac. She being cleverer than I, she managed to figure it out:
The screen gets fat and wobbly when you hold down the Command key and scroll upward with the Mighty Mouse. (Well…I don’t recall even having my hands on the keyboard, much less depressing Command while fooling with the rodent.) The solution, says she, is to hold down Command and scroll down.
Hm. So I try that.
The scroll button on the Apple rodent hasn’t worked properly in years, almost since I bought it. The thing runs sometimes, sometimes not. In the wee hours? Not.
Undaunted, I retrieved a Microsoft Mobile Mouse from another room. Loaded its gadget into a USB port, told the Mac to quit bellyaching, and soon had it running.
And yes: hold down command and scroll downward, and the screen promptly returns to normal!
Was that a relief! Thanks, Trisha!
Well, of course by then I was too keyed up to go back to sleep so explored Watchdog‘s site (check out this Mighty Mouse hack) and then ambled off on roads leading away into the virtual forest from her place. You know how that goes. You arrive at places and have no idea how you got there.
This is amazing. Bizarrely entertaining, is what I’d say: who knew watching some guy enter code (like he spoke it from infancy) to create a web design would be fascinating? Run the video at “Click on how you can design a website with Thesis” (which yes, the guy appears to be selling). It’s a pretty long production, yet strangely interesting.
Moving on, at The Nerdist, don’t even think about stumbling off to bed before checking out this dissertation. And read the comments: in the “Who Knew” department, somewhere there’s a Costco that roasts its own coffee!
And naturally I couldn’t go to sleep without reading this mouthwatering recipe for cowboy beans (more like caballero beans, actually), being on poverty rations for the time being. Glorioski! Suddenly I don’t feel deprived at-tall.
Well, maybe sleep-deprived. After three hours of Z’s, it was out the door for a long and full day. Now it’s 8:20 at night, I just sat down to the keyboard, and neither the dog nor I have eaten.
And so, to dinner.
Image: Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831-1892), Nótt riding Hrímfaxi. Public Domain.
; daily application of 
