Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

What Goes Around Comes Around

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In a good way, not just in the negative way that phrase usually connotes.

Yesterday afternoon the phone rings. It’s the guy whose company installed all those sliding doors and the window I ordered up after the late, great garage invasion. After the work they’d done, installing some very nice improvements at a comparatively reasonable price, I wrote a rave review at Angie’s List. The boss didn’t notice this until a couple of days ago, when Angie’s called to hit him up for more money (yes…people pay to be listed at that site) and mentioned that he had a couple of reviews to check. When he saw what I’d written about his company, he was beside himself with joy. Called to thank me profusely (?? I’m the one who was lucky to find this outfit!) and invited me, free of charge, to an upcoming BNI meeting.

That, he said, would give me a chance to introduce myself and hand my cards around.

Mwa ha ha! We’ll need to get our brochure printed between now and then. BNI meets at the same time one of my classes meets this semester, so it’ll have to wait until after fall classes end. But this will be a nice opportunity.

And speaking of the merry-go-round, 101 Centavos not only linked to both Adjunctorium and Funny about Money in this week’s round-up, he also generously highlighted one of my recent rants at Adjunctorium, along with a cri de coeur by a young anthropology Ph.D. that appeared at Al Jazeera.

A couple of naive comments at Centavos’ site led me to publish another rant this morning, about the specious theory that teaching is somehow “rewarding” in a metaphorical sense. Where on earth do people get ideas like that?

Image: Larry Pieniazek, View of the Grand Carousel at Kennywood. GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.

This & That

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Un-freaking-believable! It is 75 degrees out on the back porch! That is unheard-of in August in the Valley-of-the-We-Do-Mean-Sun. Night before last we had a fair amount of rain, and then a sharp storm last night—between the two, they walloped the heat down. Wish I didn’t have to be in Scottsdale at 7:30 this morning. It’s such a gorgeous morning, I ‘d sure like to be able to enjoy it over my nonbreakfast.

Beginning to feel a little better. Still far from normal, but nothing like as sick as I was. Over the past 10 days, I’ve lost seven pounds, most of them at the alarming rate of a pound a day. However, the weight seems to have stabilized at what was “normal” six months or a year ago: just overweight instead of downright fat. I’ve learned how to keep the double dose of omeprazole from upsetting the gut—it’s amazingly easy: guzzle a large mug of hot water flavored with honey & ginger before gulping down the disgusting pills; then guzzle another one immediately thereafter. Voila! No ill effect from the annoying drug. Yesterday I was actually able to eat some real food, as opposed to a tablespoon or so of yogurt at a time: a chicken thigh and a baked potato. So, maybe this thing is settling down. Either that, or I’ve already croaked over and am writing this to you from the other world.

Class started on Monday. Depressing. One poor kid in those sections is on the sixth try to get through a semester of freshman comp. How these children are gonna get by, I just don’t know. Our country needs decently paying blue-collar jobs so that people who are not cut out to sit in a classroom until their eyes glaze over can get on with their lives fresh out of high school. Offshoring those jobs or pushing down wages for the few that remain guarantees that a particular set of hard-working, honest Americans who deserve to be in the middle class will instead spend their lives in the underclass. And an underclass is not something America needs, whether you’re in it or not. A large number of citizens who are permanently under- or unemployed is, in a word, a drag on the economy.

I have nothing much else to say about money today, other than that I wish I had enough of it.

Others, however, have had plenty to say this week.

Most notably, TB at The Blue Collar Worker has had so many hair-raising life experiences crammed into this week, he must wonder if he’s living in a soap opera. It was not enough that he had to go to court (again) to testify against the nut case who pursued him into a parking lot and drew a pistol on him. A few days ago he’s driving down the road minding his own business when he witnesses a horrific crash between a motorcyclist and a semi. As you might imagine, the biker lost. Big time. TB was the first to determine that the guy was gone, a pretty disturbing moment.

Folks. You need as many tons of metal as you can get between you and the next guy on the road. Stay off the motorcycles!

Mrs. Accountability may at last have come across a way to help her DH get the accidental overspending under control. He loves his debit card, but he never has a very clear idea of how much cash is in the communal checking account. The result, of course, is an unending string of overdrafts. First, she set up a secondary checking account to protect the main, working account. And then she and Mr. A discovered that if you enter your PIN when you use the debit card, the swiper machine will tell you how much money is available in your account!

Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff asks the hive mind to opine about whether the builder is responsible for the cost of locking in the interest rate if the house isn’t finished by the time the lock ends. Interesting question.

A cadre of bloggers is writing about the current life insurance meme. IMHO, Evan’s post, at My Journey to Millions, about buying whole life for his infant son is the most interesting of the lot.

Money Beagle shares tips on how to keep the kitchen looking good.

Welp, gotta go. Twenty minutes before I have to fly to Scottsdale, and I haven’t even bathed, to say nothing of feeding the dog and dosing myself with disgusting pills. And so, it’s off and running.

Quiet on the Western Front…for the moment…

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Bila the Bosnian Painter arrived on the scene yesterday. His business clearly is doing well: he now has underlings. These he set to work moving furniture and filling cracks. I see they missed a few spots, so I’ll have to point those out to him this morning.

He peeled off the mess The Three Stooges made of the crack over the kitchen door and had one of his slaves fill it properly so it would be dry this morning. Then he went off to order paint, leaving them to drag an old bookcase and a heavy four-drawer file cabinet away from the garage walls.

Painting the garage dirt brown adobe greige will make it even darker in there than it already is. However, with the money I’ve saved by canning the Jeff the Painting Entrpreneur’s stooges and hiring Bila, I should be able to afford a tube skylight over the washer & dryer, a desiderata that I’ve coveted for some time. Should have done that while I still have a job. But short-term diddle-it-away savings have grown enough that there’s about twice as much in that account as it will take to pay Bila and have someone install the proposed skylight.

Ugh! I’ve delayed doing this fall’s course prep to the last minute. It’s already August, and all I’ve done is prepare a calendar of due dates. Have to write a whole new Eng. 101 course to fit my current scheme of making the poor little things write on topics of my choice, not the clichéd blather they put into all those high-school English papers they want to recycle in my classes.

It was a good thing My Esteemed Chair insisted that I keep the third composition course that I was trying to weasel out of. As you’ll recall, I tried to simply shuck it off, so as to have time on Tuesday afternoons for the anticipated AAME meetings. He insisted, instead, that I accept a 7:30 a.m. Monday & Wednesday section. I cringed, but couldn’t see a way to get out of it politely.

As it developed, the AAME board rejected us—they decided that because I have to hold down a miserable teaching job to put food on the table while I’m trying to build The Copyeditor’s Desk into a paying concern, what I do in my business must be a “hobby.” (Right! I never take a vacation because working 16 hours a day, seven days a week is my hobby!) One guy’s attitude was so obnoxious that I decided if they accepted us into the program, I probably would decline.

One of the endless problems with freelance writing and editing is that even professionals with long publication records and lengthy stints on newspaper and magazine staffs are not regarded, by people outside of publishing, as “working.” For most people, work is a place, not an activity. Publishers and editors recognize this and, when confronted with an obvious pro will treat you as a pro, even though your office is a bedroom in the back of your house. (They also recognize that the fields are full of wannabe’s, and those folks are likely to be treated as amateurs and hobbyists.) But people like the character on the AAME board who went out of his way to be insulting just don’t grasp that distinction.

Probably, to be fair, trying to move the pro/freelance paradigm into the business world is going to be a challenge—for that very reason: most business people expect other businesses to run out of an office.

It’s entirely possible that, if we continue to earn as we have over the past two or three months, we may be able to afford a small office. There’s a nice place in Tempe where I could imagine setting up shop, and in town, I covet an ersatz Spanish-style garden office building on east Missouri that always has vacancies. The recession-that-is-not-a-depression is still in force here, despite improving real estate prospects, and so commercial office buildings have plenty of empty space. First, though, Tina and I each need an income. After that, we’ll think about other blandishments. Personally, I’d rather have the business buy me a car than set me up in an office…but whatever works, works.

Well, speaking of the Workman Waltz, as we were above, I’d better feed the dog and get something to eat myself before the first dance of the day begins. And so, to…heaven only knows what! Then, to work…

Getting Funnier and Funnier about Everything

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Face it: I’ve become a crazy old lady. If I started out “funny” about money, now I’m a little strange about most everything. It could be accentuated by 115-degree heat, which makes you crazy when you go out in it and makes you stir-crazy by imprisoning you inside air-conditioned boxes. But likely there was some underlying funniness to start with…

Check it out:

The big potted ficus tree, which gives the potentially stark back porch some character and even a little shade, is getting sunburned in the blasting heat. That’s even though the thing is under the shade of the patio roof. The morning sun is so fierce it burns the leaves before it gets high enough to be blocked by the roof.

Don’t believe it? Last night the patio thermometer read 101 degrees…at ten o’clock at night! Don’t even ask how hot it gets out there in the daytime.

The tree is roped to the patio upright, because the stiff breezes we get at this time of year (normal people would call them “violent dust storms”) invariably knock it over, causing me to have to risk putting my back out (again) pulling it upright and creating quite a nice mess. It is not gunna get unroped.

What to do?

Well, I had these curtains left after I built new sheer curtains for the bedroom. Think of that.

Screwed a few more cuphooks into the patio beam and then hung the drapes on those. Voila!

Gorgeous, huh?

They’re even more colorful when viewed from the other side, a scenic embellishment visible from the street, if you’re curious enough to peer over the wall.

Oh well. They’ll come down as soon as the weather moderates, probably mid- to late August.

One nice thing about this lash-up is that it creates a kind of tent where I can shuck off my clothes and wrap a towel around myself to dart over to the pool without being observed from the neighbor’s front windows or by tall or nosy passers-by.

Speaking of the wall and scenic embellishments and privacy, I tied another lash-up to the east wall bordering the street:Exquisite, no?

Those things are old tumble-down wooden trellises, to which I nailed old shade screen and then tied to the wall’s decorative block row. They also serve to block curious eyes from peering into my yard as I go about my business, often in various states of undress. Look just awful! But they’ll do the job until those hopseed bushes can get big enough to take over from the deceased devil-pod tree as a privacy screen.

This is the joy of not living in a homeowner’s association: you’re free to decorate your yard in Early Poor White Trash.

Just look at those bushes! They were little one-gallon twigs when I planted them this spring. At that time they just came up to the bottom of the third row of blocks from the bottom—not counting the row that’s half-buried there. Now they’re almost to the top of the wall! They certainly will have reached the top by the end of the summer. From what I can tell, they’re pretty frost-tolerant—not that we get hard freezes around here anymore, thanks to the global warming that is not global warming. So assuming they don’t freeze down to the ground this winter, by next summer they should be tall and vigorous enough to block the view from the road. Thank goodness!

And speaking of the hopseed bushes, remember the “oleander” I reported as having volunteered in a pot? Well…hmmmm….

“Oleander”→

←Hopseed bush

Now personally, I still don’t think they’re the same. Click for extreme close-ups and notice the slightly wavy edges on the known hopseed bush, and then compare with the smooth edges on the intruder. Also the volunteer plant has shiny (oleander-like!) leaves, whereas the hopseed’s leaves are slightly less waxy-looking. However, the leaves are the same size and color and the growing habit is strangely similar.

We’ll know sooner or later. If the visitor puts out pink, magenta, or white flowers, it will give itself away. However…if that thing is a baby hopseed bush, it doesn’t bode well. The  hopseeds growing fifty feet away from it put out about three little seed pods this spring. If they sprout that readily, once they start really producing pods, we’ll have a bumper crop of hopseed babes!

My favorite orange tree, the one that produces fruit so sweet they taste like candy, has been suffering. This spring it quit adding new leaves, and the leaves that still cling to the branches are as sunburned as the ficus’s. I really don’t want that tree to die.

I think the problem is that it hasn’t been getting enough water. The other tree, which is thriving, is planted on a slight incline, so that the bubbler pours water toward the alley. To keep all the water from flowing out under the back gate, I built a berm along its north side, creating a well for the water to pool. Also, the sickly tree has the bubbler installed right next to the trunk (not good for citrus, I’m told), and so the water coming out of that bubbler has never spread out to the drip line.

←An orange tree is supposed to look like this.

So, I broke out the shovel and the hoe and, over three days, scraped the crushed granite back away from the tree, mounding it up to build a berm under the drip line. Really, it probably should be further out from the drip line than this, but that would make the side yard nonnavigable. Still need to get some river rocks to shore it up—otherwise the first hard rain (which, if we’re gonna get it, should come in the next month) will melt this fine moon crater back down to grade level.

It was a bitch of a job in 112-degree heat. But…uhm…good exercise. I still need to cut the shade cloth underlaying loose and pull it out, but I may foist that job onto Gerardo. Then probably will spread some compost around the bottom of the crater.

Yesterday I finally bought the proposed cell phone: a Nokia X 2. Apparently this is an older model that T-Mobile is trying to get rid of by offering as an Internet-only deal. You can’t get it in the stores, nor can you get the plan I want: $30 for 100 minutes of talk, unlimited texting, and unlimited Web crawling. In fact, if you ask about it in the store, they’ll tell you T-Mobile doesn’t offer it at all and try to get you to buy the 1500 minutes of talk or text messages plus a generous 3 MB of Web usage. Uh huh.

It takes two to five days for the phone to show up, assuming it actually does show up. Let’s hope they haven’t yanked the coveted plan by then. You can’t sign up for the plan until you have the phone in hand.

Anyway, the phone is well reviewed. Its data speeds aren’t great, but I don’t intend to use it for web-surfing. I have a perfectly fine iPad for that job, should I feel impelled to surf the web and check e-mail while I’m driving to campus. This thing will do the job nicely for sending texts to certain sons who no longer answer the telephone at all, for calling friends, and for summoning roadside assistance when the Dog Chariot breaks down, as it inevitably will, one of these days.

Well, it’s past time for me to get on with my crazed life. And so, to work…

July 4: A Miracle Happens in Arizona!

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Holy mackerel! It’s almost 8:30 in the morning and the temperature is only 85 degrees! Doors and windows are open, fresh (if somewhat soggy) air is flowing through the house, fans are blowing…air conditioning is OFF! Off off off, for the first time in weeks!!

We awoke at 5 to a solid overcast and bizarrely cool air. This is the first July 4 I can remember that has not been searing, scorching hot. Normally at this time of year the outside air is so hot all you want to do is huddle inside your air-conditioned box. People in Alaska get snowbound in winter; here the residents are heatbound, and just as stir-crazy.

Actually…I may overspeak.

Before the low desert was obscenely overdeveloped, it used to be that summer storms would roll in about 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Mornings and early afternoons would be hot—though nothing like they are today. Temps would be 105, maybe 110 at most. Then the afternoon rains would drop the temperature, abruptly, to around 80 degrees. This happened every day from early July through the end of August.

Now 110 is a “normal” day, and temperatures of 112 to 115 are routine. I can remember when a 112-degree day was extraordinary, and 115 degrees, unheard-of. We rarely see summer rains anymore, and when we do, it’s long after dark.

Our nasty summers are the direct result of paving over the desert. We’ve created a heat bubble that acts like a big plastic dome over the city. Where thirty years ago rainstorms would flow across the Valley floor, now they bounce off a barrier of reflected, amplified heat. As they cascade in from the southeast, you can see them split aside and pass by the city, the clouds moving out of the Valley and proceeding around through Carefree and Anthem to the north and below the South Mountains and the Estrellas in the other direction. Indirectly, climate warming undoubtedly has something to do with it. Either way, it stems from the same basic primate stupidity.

Oh well.

So de bonne heure it was out the door and into the backyard, there to continue reconstructing the landscaping now that Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy has outgrown the need for dog-sitting and taken up full-time residence at M’hijito’s house.

Yesterday I made a run on Home Depot to pick up some new plants. At first I thought not to get new bedding plants, because it does seem like an exercise in futility. Young annuals are almost bound to fricassee in the hot little bed next to the pool. And putting water in there will just cause all those damn weeds, whose thready roots now infest the soil, to come surging back. But I couldn’t resist.

Picked up two six-packs of zinnias, one of red salvia, and one of something called lisianthus. All of these allegedly crave six+ hours of full sun a day. We’ll see. These plants may define “sun” as something other than “blast furnace.”

Salvia does do pretty well out there. A volunteer between the pots and two plants in one of the pots next to the bed are still alive, despite the heat and drought. As for a lisianthus: never heard of it before. Kinda pretty blue thing, though. All these plants look a little tired. They were sopping wet yesterday afternoon when I set them on the shaded table beneath the patio overhang. This morning they were parched and looking peakèd. We’ll see if they recover after being put in the ground and generously watered.

The two salvia in the pot are sharing space with, of all things, an oleander that volunteered in there! I’ve never seen oleander volunteer before. They do make a seed pod, so it’s not out of the question…but how did the seed get into the pot? Oleander is very toxic and will kill birds (and just about anything else) that eat any part of it. Seeds, flowers, stems, leaves: the whole damn plant is poisonous.

Hm. Come to think of it, there was a dead dove out there awhile back…

However.

It gets quite large (we have 30-foot-high hedges in the neighborhood), and it makes a pretty flower. So I’m thinking that when the weather cools a little, I’ll move this little guy into the center of a larger pot and see if it’ll grow as a patio ornamental. If it doesn’t…well, it didn’t cost anything.

Oleander is expected to go extinct in the Valley within a decade. A bacterial infection carried by a type of leaf-hopper is killing them off. There’s no treatment for it, and nothing seems to be effective against the insect, either. Not a great loss…but another of those changes having to do with too many people doing too many disruptive things that, in concert, alter the nature of our living space.

Two days ago I soaked the flowerbed, to soften the soil so as to dig out the weeds. This morning? Bone dry! So it looks like to keep these things alive I’ll have to water every day and deep-water every two or three days. Another chore added to the daily list.

Well, it’ll be worth it if they grow and prettify the pool area.

Speaking of adding chores, I also picked up a couple indoor plants, too: on sale for ten bucks. One is a fiddle-leaf fig; the other an umbrella plant.

These are both varieties of ficus.

The potted ficus on the back porch thrives, although it’s sunburned right now because the blast of the morning sun has been too much for it. I’ve propped a screen against it, but that thing blows over in the lightest breeze. Guess I’m going to have to put up some hooks along the patio overhang’s beams and hang a length of shade cloth from them.

Later.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if I can keep these things alive indoors. Didn’t realize the fiddle-leaf fig is somewhat xeric. Its soil was very dry, so I put it under the faucet and soaked it. Only then did I bother to go online and discover that it prefers to be dry and does not like soaking. The umbrella tree apparently has more normal watering needs, so watering that is less likely to kill it. But I figure that despite the passing cloud cover, the air here is so dry the fiddle-leaf will soon desiccate to its preference, and after that I’ll be more careful about watering it.

The neighborhood had its annual July 4 parade at 7:30 this morning. I’ve been to it once and almost expired in the heat. But the weather was so clement today I considered trotting over to the park to watch the goings-on. But…

But…so many excuses!

But…by 8:30, when the parade ends, if the cloud cover broke it would be way too hot for Cassie to walk home.

But…at 6:30 it was starting to rain. Did I really want to stand out in the rain to watch an extremely small-time parade and listen to some politicians harangue us?

But…my foot hurts. A lot! (Boy, does it hurt!)

But…my back still hurts.

But…I’m not drivin’ a block and a half and fighting for a place to park, because that would be ridiculous.

But…I’d rather go swimming.

But…I want to sit outside for breakfast.

Can’t believe it’s now nine in the morning and still nice enough to have the doors open.

Time to get up and put some water on the frazzled roses. And so…to work!

There but for the Grace of God…

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Here’s a hair-raising story of not just one but several formerly middle-class Americans who today are living out of their cars. The issue has become so dire in California that a nonprofit in Santa Barbara has arranged with various owners of large parking lots to provide “safe” space for people to car-camp. Meanwhile, so much as a whiff of the word “homeless” makes it even more difficult—indeed, pretty much impossible—for these once decently earning workers and small-business owners to get jobs.

Looking at photos of Janis Adkins trying to make a home in the back of a Toyota Sienna—which happens to be the make and model of the Dog Chariot, though hers is newer than mine—I thought, holy Christ! How lucky am I not to be walking in her shoes! Like Adkins, I’ve never been able to get another real job; not for any lack of trying, either. But at least I’m still in my home.

So…what happened that kept a roof over my head while she was being put out on the street?

Well, I think it’s a combination of a few decisions made, long ago, that happened to be right (even though they were questionable at the time), raw luck, and social safety nets that kicked in just in the nick of time.

The Decisions

The big decision, maybe the only smart one I’ve made since I left my husband, was to pay off my house.

One day while I was tooling up the freeway, a little revelation dawned: once the alimony ran out, the mortgage on my home would consume over half my net income, which was, shall we say, not very generous to begin with. I was just getting by on a combination of the alimony and net pay for a full-time, non-tenure-track teaching position at the Great Desert University. In fact, most months I ran a little in the red. With the alimony gone, my salary would not cover the mortgage payments and put food on the table. I needed to pay off the $80,000 mortgage as fast as I could: clear it off the books before I had to rely on salary alone to live.

A small inheritance from my father, another from a remote aunt, plus some other money I then had in short-term corporate bonds would close that debt. My financial adviser had a freaking kitten when I told him I intended to cash out those investments and pay them toward the house. “You’re over-invested in real estate,” said he (my 403(b) owned an REIT), “and it wouldn’t be a good idea to pay off the mortgage.”

Right.

So I went right ahead and did it.

Eight or ten years later, I sold that house and used the cash to buy a comparable house in a quieter, better-kept part of the neighborhood, with a pool, a larger lot, and lots of upgrades. Selling price of the old house was more than twice what I paid for it.

If I hadn’t had that cash to buy this house, I’d be up to my nose in debt today, since it also cost more than twice what I paid for the first shack. And if I’d owed money to a bank at the time GDU canned me and all my staff, I probably couldn’t have paid it. Almost certainly, by now I would have lost my home, and I, too, could be living in a minivan under some parking-lot’s trees.

Other lucky/wise decisions:

• Bought a Toyota. Today, when I can’t afford to buy a newer car, it’s 12 years old, has 112,000 miles on it, and still runs like a top.
• Got in the habit of living frugally. Not being able to go out to eat, to take a trip, to afford cable or a cell phone, to see a movie or go to a concert: none of those is much of a hardship, because I didn’t do those things in the first place.
• Didn’t get another big dog. Few things will empty your bank account faster than the cost of owning large dogs. Especially German shepherds…
• Banked at a credit union, which did not then and still does not inflict nicks and gouges for the privilege of letting them invest my money.
• Refinanced the house my son and I were co-purchasing through the credit union, which made a loan modification as soon as we told them I was out of work.

Raw Luck

The expensive dogs were gone by the time I lost my job. Not that I wanted to lose them. But today I couldn’t even begin to pay the vet and drug bills for the German shepherd. I’d have had to find another home for her, had she still been living when GDU canned me.

The university laid me off on the last day that people were eligible for the 50% COBRA discount.

My health was good, my teeth were good, and I already had all the pairs of glasses and contact lenses I needed.

My car, all the appliances in the house, and the air conditioner were running well.

A hailstorm wrecked the roof and the ancient air-conditioner, causing the homeowner’s insurance carrier to replace both of those very expensive items, each of which will probably last as long as I’m likely to stay in the house.

The Social Safety Nets

No way could I have afforded health insurance if I’d had to pay the full freight of COBRA. Thanks to the 50% discount, which I grabbed just under the wire, COBRA cost me less than Medicare does. We might note, however, that Medicare costs approximately eight times what I was paying for an EPO that gave me access to the best doctors and medical facilities in the Valley. Still. I’d have been uninsurable if I’d had to pay the full cost of COBRA.

Mercifully, I was already eligible for Social Security. Although I was forced to take it at a much-reduced rate—I’d intended to wait until I was 70, another six years, to collect Social Security—it paid several times the amount of Unemployment Insurance, without the hassles. The $2,400/semester the adjunct teaching pays would have rendered me ineligible for UI, anyway.

And, thank God, I became eligible for Medicare on the first day of the month after COBRA ended. Paying eight times what health insurance should cost for less coverage and fewer willing providers is less than perfectly desirable, but at least I’ve got some coverage!

Overall, it was a confluence of decent financial management, one or two reasonably intelligent decisions, frugal living, crucial government antipoverty programs, and incredible luck that kept me from spending my old age in a minivan. Even though things can be difficult at times, at least I have my home and my health. So far. My mother was right: I am blessed.