Charley the Golden Retriever is always beside himself with doggy joy when M’hijito gets off work and comes by to pick him up. Somehow dogs know what time it is. Charley and Cassie start watching the front door along about 5:00 p.m., and no matter how late the human is, they keep up the vigil till they hear his car roll into the driveway. Then they dance the evening two-step.
Charley has this wacko upside-down thing he likes to do. He tries to stand on his head. He’s so happy he can’t contain himself.
Don’t ask. I have no idea where he learned to do that!
Speaking of learning, over at Grumpy Rumblings, Femme Frugality gets a conversation going when she asks “What are the qualities in your ideal student? Where’s the line between being a good student and being a kiss-ass?” If you ever doubted that academics are grumpy, this will clear your mind.
Prairie Ecothrifter has a nice post how to deal with the needy sibling. Probably easier said than done…but good words and true. This advice also applies to the child who always needs rescuing, usually with a hand-out.
Over at The Digerati Life, SVB contemplates some of the worst jobs in creation. LOL! I’d include teaching freshman comp in there…not as high on the list as being a cop or serving in the military, o’course, but certainly on a par with collecting trash (which, by the way, pays significantly better than what I earned with my Ph.D. and my Phi Beta Kappa key in a full-time university position).
Speaking of jobs, check out Steve’s take on ten quotes about careers over at Brip Blap. There’s some entertaining and some profound stuff here, from Hilary Clinton’s advice (“Don’t confuse having a career with having a life”) to Steve’s reflections on some of these bons mots (“Americans confuse education with achievement”).
Here’s an awesome recipe (with mouth-watering photo) at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander.
Revanche grinds her teeth, at A Gai Shan Life, over having to pay some dumb tax. Heh…who among us has not shared the privilege?
Donna Freedman does it again with an amazing riff on midnight movies and guilty pleasures. How can that woman write so much and still manage to write so well?
Did you see Evan’s post at My Journey to Millions on ethnicity and patterns in investing? As you can imagine, he stirred up a fair amount of controversy, some of it totally off the wall. Speaking of amazing.
Several PF bloggers have been talking about long-term care insurance lately. Free Money Finance considers some refinements on long-term care policies, which are worth thinking about.
Mrs. Accountability at Out of Debt Again asks if you like to use the ubiquitous store saver cards. Guess I’m nuts, but I just hate those things. What a scam!
Every time it rains in the low desert and snows in the high country, we know it’s gonna freeze come the first clear, cloudless night.
Welp, as we scribble we are enjoying that first clear, cloudless night. It as, as my daddy used to say, colder’n a bygod out there! I just spent a chunk of time covering stationary plants and hauling movable pots into the house.
Exactly what a bygod is, I never could figure out. His rustic turn of phrase (he had many, because by birth and temperament he was pretty rustic) always conjured up that metal idol the raging pagans used to incinerate infant sacrifices to their gods. You know…from Sunday School?
Okay, maybe your Sunday School was somewhat less rustic.
More recently I’ve come to think it’s a variant of bigod or by God, as in “by God, it’s cold out there!”
So as we sit in front of the cozy little space heater, let us count our bloggish blessings:
One of our favorite bloggers posts, on Facebook, that she’s in far colder climes than lovely uptown Phoenix, which will only reach about 32 degrees tonite: Talkeetna, Alaska, where she’s watching a competition of wilderness women. Somehow she’s managed to fill the pages on Surviving and Thriving, though (the woman must do nothing but travel and write!). Presently she’s offering a TSA-friendly travel bag as a giveaway and reporting entertainingly on her Black Friday adventures (oh god, am I glad I’m too broke to do that!).
Belatedly I’ve managed to get around to adding Frau Tech’s site to the blogroll. She gnashes her teeth about many of the same things that make my teeth grind: the state of American education, the inanity of the American workplace, the status of women in any place… Not only that, but my friend KJG’s daughter is a fine young engineer, requiring me not only to acknowledge FT’s site but to forward the link to her.
Over at Budgets are Sexy, J. Money has about had it with Black Friday, and so he offers a much more interesting topic for the day. Heh heh heh heh heh….
Take a look at the “Reader Story” guest post buy one Joe Z, at Get Rich Slowly. Joe addresses the issue of moving your family overseas for work, something that the current generation is calling “geographic arbitrage.” My seagoing father called it “taking a shore job for Standard Oil in Saudi Arabia,” but the effect was about the same as it is for young people today. And IMHO, it’s something every young American with a marketable skill should consider.
What with the current enthusiasm for raising your own chickens (La Maya and La Bethulia have got a clutch of chicks nesting in a back room!), Mrs. Accountability tells the tale of the time she and Mr. A decided to raise their own Thanksgiving turkeys. Pretty amazing!
At My Journey to Millions, Evan writes a letter to his son, celebrating son’s first birthday. Cute photos, too! LOL! The old man has to allow that all those smug friends and relatives who used to cluck “you’ll understand when you have kids” may have been right.
Money Beagle advises on things to consider before buying a condo—thoughts that could apply to any HOA that’s in a position to charge an assessment.
Well, the pork roast is cooked and I hunger. Later!
It’s 70 degrees out there in the backyard! At last, the worst of the heat is breaking. Even though the days are still in the low 100s, the evenings and mornings are cool and the temperature of the pool has dropped enough to make a swim refreshing again. Hurrah!
Let’s celebrate with a tour around the blogosphere.
Mr. and Mrs. Accountability have been married for four years and for twenty-five years! Next month they’ll be celebrating the fourth anniversary of their second marriage. Spinning off a review of blogger Tightwad’s first ebook, Tightwad’s Frugal Bride, Mrs. A. reminisces interestingly about the many clever ways she built frugality into her most recent wedding.
At PF Firewall, Jesse discovered a fitness gadget that, in addition to reporting your calorie-burning activities, can track your sleep patterns. Could come in handy for those of us who live with chronic insomnia.
Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche agonizes about the wisdom of having a child, given some challenging health issues she has to deal with day by day. It’s one of two thoughtful posts on the subject, and this post contains two links to moving stories by other young women in the same predicament.
At Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman as usual has a whole bouquet of great posts. She holds forth with passion on the subject of lending to friends, and, a few days later, produces a playful encomium to the bandanna.
Crystal, proprietor of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, is endlessly amazing. I can’t even begin to imagine how she finds time for all work and activities she does related to her blogging empire. Now, though, we learn she manages to watch an amazing list of television shows. The woman must never sleep.
Frugal Scholar has an interesting rumination on the practice of couch surfing—you know, where people rent out a spare bedroom or the sofa to penurious travelers. Frugal Son is planning to travel around Europe this way…with his grandmother! Check out the comments, where an attractive, if slightly less frugal, alternative is offered.
Speaking of travel strategies, at Five Cent Nickel writer Hank Coleman holds forth with a series of caveats about timeshares.
What do college professors worry about? Nicoleandmaggie agonize over the classic headaches at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured.
At The Digerati Life, Silicon Valley Blogger discusses the pro’s and cons of charging extra-large bills (such as taxes or annual homeowner’s insurance premiums) to a credit card. Interesting post with some nice insights.
Simply Forty’s proprietor Mary takes note of what she suspects is a new trend: women toting not one but two handbags around. Hey! If one heavy bag puts you out of balance and knocks your shoulder out, then two oughta put you back in balance and relieve the neck pain. Right?
Free Money Finance recently noted the risks of discussing subjects such as insurance claims on social media sites. It’s amazing what people will put out there! I find myself having to remind students who want to write about the glories of legalizing marijuana not to discuss their shady behavior in writing. Sometimes this elicits nothing more than a blank look.
Welp, it’s 6:00 a.m. at last and time to get going. Later!
Okay, so I was going to write a nice, solid PF piece with a fine political spin, but…it’s 110+ out there, I’ve run all over town, now have a couple of margaritas under my belt, and about all I’m up for is editing a detective novel (if that) and nattering on here. And hereabouts, about the best I can come up with is a few handy household hints.
Get gunk off wooden surfaces with mineral oil
The cheapest mineral oil in the world is to be had at Ikea. They call it Skydd; I call it Skkwsh.
Mineral oil (or baby oil, which is the same thing, but don’t put either of them on your baby) works miracles on soiled wood. Some people use it to polish furniture with oil finish; I personally don’t care much for that use, because it leaves an ever-so-slightly tacky film. However, it is the business for cleaning sticky stuff off utilitarian pieces of furniture and kitchen grease off the ledges and crannies of your kitchen cabinets.
This noon I made a run on Costco (’nother hint: never do that on Saturday!), where I finally brought myself to buy a folding table to hold the semi-permanent garage junk that has needed a home for a long time. Among other things, since time immemorial the shredder and the crockpot have each been perched on separate vintage cheap-wooden folding TV tables. Many’s the time I’ve thought that if I just had one of those large, cheapo work tables churches and schools always seem to have on hand, it could hold those two items plus a great deal of other in-the-way junk, and even more in-the-way junk could be stowed beneath it.
Rescued vintage tables
Bringing this object—the folding utility table—into the garage liberated the two ancient TV tables. I brought them into the kitchen to clean them, it being way too hot in the garage for anything resembling physical work. They each had some sort of black greasy gunk, presumably well-aged drips from the crockpot seasoned with dust-storm residue. Wiping them off with a wet paper towel did nothing to dislodge the black greasy spots.
Best to hide the things...
But: rubbing a little mineral oil into the top of the table, letting it sit for a minute, and then wiping it vigorously off removed the stuff without a whimper. Cut about 15 years off the crotchety old tables’ apparent age, too. Sure would be nice if the gunk would have the same effect on the aged human face.
Don’t even think of trying that. It’s toxic.
Moving on…
Store household cleaners in plastic tubs…and be smart about it!
Said garage is lined with storage cabinets, and one of the shelves of said storage cabinets holds my various lifetime supplies of household chemicals. Among those chemicals one could find a couple of bottles of ammonia, which I use to make a DIY version of Windex glass cleaner.
I keep these things, for convenience, in small plastic bins, the sort of things that used to be sold as dishwashing pans. They make it possible to slide out a whole slew of bottles and cans, rather than having to stick my head into the cabinet and shuffle through a bunch of containers in the dark
Welp, turns out this habit has another benefit: if one of those containers leaks, the plastic bin collects and contains the liquid, keeping it from creating a gawdawful mess all over your cabinetry!
Yesterday afternoon preparatory to washing the Arcadia doors, I pulled out a bottle of ammonia, therewith to whip up some more glass & tile cleaner…only to have it splash on my bare feet! The damn plastic bottle had developed a leak!
Pulled out the plastic bin, hauled out and rinsed its contents. Godlmighty but in there were not one but two unopened bottles of Clorox toilet cleaner, a substance liberally laced with chlorine bleach. As we know,
ammonia + chlorine bleach = death.
Mercifully, the toilet-cleaner plastic bottles were not breached. I carried them into the backyard anyway.And the particleboard shelves were unruined—they would have been trashed if ammonia had been quietly dripping onto them for God only knows how long. So:
Item: Storing bottles of household chemicals in plastic bins is a good idea. But…
Item: Do not store products that contain bleach in the same plastic bin with products that contain ammonia!
Get gunk off tile grout
Before in the foreground; cleaned toward the top
Satan and Proserpine, previous owners of the Funny Farm, laid a bunch of tiles down in the living room, hall, kitchen, and dining room, all by their little selves. My tile dude said they did a good job of it, but like moi was mystified at the reason for their having slathered the grout with off-white “sealer” that really is nothing more than a type of latex paint.
Now…what happens to white grout over time?
Yeah. It collects dirt and turns…well, dirt-colored.
Same thing happens to fake white grout created by painting real grout with latex “sealer”: over time, the joints in S & P’s tiles (hm. Hadn’t thought of that confluence. Was the latest market crash and rape of the Baby Boom’s savings caused by Satan and Proserpine themselves?) …Yes, the joints in the tiles had become grody, to put it kindly. Yesterday with Pup out of my hair and all of next semester’s courses designed and posted online, I took it upon myself to do some serious cleaning.
What should I find when I emptied out the plastic bin into which a bottle of ammonia had slowly been leaking but a box of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser wall cleaner knockoffs from Target!
Recalling that these strange chemical sponges do a great job of cleaning the grout between Mexican tiles on the countertop, I decided to try them on the fake grout paint stuff on the floor.
Amazing!
Totally after
It made a huge difference: so huge that where I accidentally missed a line of grout, it jumps right out at me. The tiles look almost as bright and clean as they did when I moved in here, shortly after those two painted the stuff on all the grout in the house.
The box contained four pieces of the stuff, which dissolves annoyingly as you scrub with it. These cleaned the kitchen, dining room, and the endless hall floors. Next weekend I’ll have to buy another box of the stuff from Tar-Zhay and do the living room. Very, very effective.
Make magnetic fridge notepad and pencil
You’ve seen those cutesie magnetized notepads with stick-to-the-fridge coordinating pencils and ballpoints? Of course, being a little funny about money yourself, you’re too cheap to spend the stupid amounts of money these pieces of kitsch cost, even though you can imagine the handiness of having a pad of paper hanging from the refrigerator, there to post stuff you’ve run out of.
Well, cheap yourself out of these things no longer!
First, get yourself an old-fashioned yellow pencil, the kind that’s milled with six flat sides. Cut off a two-inch-long (or so) strip of rubbery stuff the width of one of these sides. Remove the protective backing and stick it onto the pencil, just below the eraser.
Voilà! Now you have a pencil that will stick on the fridge. And I suppose you see the rest of this coming, eh?
Now get yourself a small yellow pad, 5 x 8 inches. These are available in lifetime supplies at my favorite purveyor of middle-class goods, Costco.
At any good craft store (such as Michael’s or even…yes! Home Depot) you can find magnetized sheets of bendy rubbery stuff, which you can cut with scissors.
The rubbery stuff has a stick-on backing, which is and is not sufficient for our purposes.
Cut off several more fairly large pieces of rubberized stuff, so that you can glue at least a couple on the cardboard backside of the yellow pad. It will probably take more than one. Depending on the brand of magnetic rubbery stuff, I’ve had it take two or three pieces to hold up a mini-yellow pad.
Do not buy a lifetime supply of magnetic rubbery stuff! It’s ridiculously easy to reuse this stuff. When you run out of paper, or when you’ve sharpened your pencil down to where its magnetic holder resides, simply pull off the rubbery stuff and glue it, using some Elmer’s or carpenter’s glue, onto a new pencil or pad. It lasts forever.
And there you are: A kewl yellow pad and pencil, hanging at your disposal on the fridge at all times!
Out and About on the Web
And if you’ve done all these things and still find yourself at loose ends, pass some time at a few friends’ websites:
Guess I’m not the only one who loved (or at least got excited about) this post from Nicole and Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured on passing judgment about other people based on their personal pastimes. It’s a great post, and the comments come up to the same standard. Hm. You know, I think this may be one of the truly great personal blogs out there, right up there with Donna Freedman’s Surviving and Thriving.
In the earning, planning, and saving department, Evan has a few well-placed observations over at My Journey to Millions.
And along those lines, FMF offers some really startling insights at Free Money Finance. This is quite a piece of writing. If you’re still in your earning years, you need to read it. If you’re not but have children or friends who are, pass it along.
But in the same department, SVB over at Silicon Valley Blog brings up an entirely new set of questions about planning for lifetime savings and retirement.
Image (other than Funny’s): “All is Vanity” by C. Allan Gilbert. Life, death, and meaning of existence are intertwined. (Woman gazing into boudoir mirror forms shape of skull.) Public Domain.
Ooof! Overworked into near silence for the past few days. And incredibly tired: no sleep, to speak of, all week long.
Tuesday an old friend who had dropped off the face of the earth called. It develops that the reason she faded from the scene had to do with some very serious trouble her adult son managed to get himself into, of a truly crushing nature. She’s been trying to cope with that since last November. Now that he’s on his way to the slam, I guess she hopes to reconnect with the world. Heartbreaking…I lay awake most of that night thinking on how devastated she must be.
But otherwise, the workload has been ever so slightly astonishing, so I’ve been working into the wee hours almost every night anyway.
Yesterday it looked like I would finally get a break. I figured if I could just keep plugging away into the evening, I’d get through the last of my share of the stoont papers, and then I’d have THREE FULL DAYS free of drudgery! No class today—Friday—a whole day to myself. Tomorrow my friend KJG, her daughter, and I are meeting mid-town for lunch and then an afternoon concert. And Sunday: all mine.
Or so I thought.
I did get through the papers. But…when I got home from campus, there on the server was a message from my erstwhile client, wanting me to read more copy and get it back by Monday.
Buh-bye, weekend!
And the electrician called back saying he wants to show up to do the repairs on the ominous light switch this morning. So don’t leave town…
These developments required that all the backed-up chores awaiting the first day of the new budget cycle (which was yesterday) had to be done on the way home from campus, pushing bed-time back by the same number of hours that the errands kept me from work.
Among other things, I finally schlepped Harvey back to Leslie’s to be repaired: $80. He’s working again, though, and after a brief wrestle with a pile of beans and strangling leaves from the devil-pod tree, I dropped him back in the water and watched him vacuum up the dirt from the last dust storm. (Yes. We had another one. No where near as dramatic as the one that made national news, but messy.)
The electrician’s visit will probably run another $80. And a notice came in the mail that the car has to have another pointless emissions test and then I have to cough up this year’s registration rip-off. That will run around $100 to $150.
So much mud from the dust storms has accreted in the pool’s DE filter that I’ll have to get the service man back here to take it apart and clean it out again—very prematurely. He was just here a couple of months ago. That’s a $150 job that ordinarily doesn’t have to be done more than once or twice a year.
So. Here we are in the second day of the flicking budget cycle, and I’ve already spent more than I can afford! Two days in, and I’m already dipping into emergency savings to cover the July/August bills.
If these costs had happened in the winter—anytime between November and March or April—I could have afforded them. But not. flicking. NOW!
At any rate, I won’t have time to contemplate that over the weekend (or to clean my filthy house or tend to the bedraggled garden or wash and vacuum the car or puppy-proof the house or track down new puppy stuff on Craig’s List or make a puppy mattress or clean out the storage shed and garden shelves or sit down with my feet up or to read something that I’d like to read) because I’ll be editing copy, a job that quickly expands to fill all available moments.
Oh well.
Likely won’t be posting over the weekend, either. There won’t be enough hours in the days for that.
So, by way of keeping ourselves entertained here in the blogosphere, let’s get a little help from our friends:
Have you been following Frugal Scholar’s adventures in France? She’s been posting off and on as she and Mr. FS enjoy their time there, and it’s been really interesting. Check out today’s rumination on shopping (or the freedom therefrom) and then, if you’re not an FS regular, scroll back through the past few weeks’ posts. Lots of fresh and interesting stuff there.
Revanche has been posting regularly about Doggle. She and PiC jumped off the financial cliff and purchased a Dog Chariot ( 🙂 !), but that’s far from the last of the story. LOL! Looks to me like this hound is what SDXB liked to call Anna the Ger-Shep: a thousand-dollar-a-day dog!
While perusing the comments there, I came across a cool site by one of N&M’s readers, Clarissa’s Blog. The proprietor of that worthy space offers a lead to her post on an affiliate program called SkimLinks, which looks pretty interesting. In passing, I looked up reviews of SkimLinks and didn’t see much that was negative; this could be worth looking into.
Speaking of the which—quitting the day job to retire on the untold riches pouring in from your Internet business, that is—SVB recently held forth again on that subject. Check out her interesting advice, based on personal experience, on trading the day job for a flexible work schedule.
Budgeting in the Fun Stuff is now a free woman! She’s finally sprung the shackles of the daily grind and taken off into self-employment. This has been a long-standing goal for her. Congratulations, BiFS!
101 Centavos weighs in on the national debt issue with a solidly written discussion of the general hysteria, of the facts, and of the comparative positions of the U.S. vis-á-vis several European nations.
Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan, thinking to some degree along the same lines as Centavos’s (i.e., that managing a family budget is similar to running a government), asks readers if they would ever go past their own debt limits, and under what circumstances.
And speaking of debt, Mrs. Accountability at Out of Debt Again reports that Mr. A’s business is picking up, and that recently they’ve managed to knock down their debt by almost a thousand bucks.
Funny is celebrating the Fourth of July by hosting the Totally Money Carnival. Today among other things I’ll be spending some time viewing the posts that have already come in. Submissions are open until 6:00 p.m. Sunday, Central Daylight Time. So be sure to submit your best and totally money story through this handy form.
Urkl. The workload during the present “vacation” has been so outrageous I haven’t sent any of my own pieces to carnivals for several weeks. Nor, for that matter, have I written much that could reasonably be accused of falling into the “personal finance” category. 🙄
Worse, I haven’t had time to read many of my favorite blogs, or comment on them. Blogger’s new scheme to force readers to create their own Blogger site before they’ll let you comment has discouraged me from reading and commenting on blogs in general, mostly because many of my favorite sites are on Blogger. This started at Frugal Scholar, who’s adventuring in Nantes just now. Be sure to keep an eye on that site for updates.
At a Gai Shan Life, where Blogger also has decided to block comments from non-members, Revanche pauses in her wedding plans to reflect on the cost of adopting a dog—a cost she detailed a few days ago. LOL! Dogs do cost a ton of money. Sounds like Revanche and PiC’s new critter, though, is worth it.
Donna Freedman has posted a number of interesting pieces since last I visited my friends. Here it is, almost the Fourth of July, and she’s already thinking about Christmas giving. Possibly this is a way of deflecting thoughts about the death of a beloved aunt and that lifelong loneliness we suffer when we lose our loved ones.
At the Digerati Life, SVB compares public school and private school costs. Public schools in California are getting expensive, what with taxpayer revolts and the general collapse of the body politick there.
Hm. Speaking of home-schooling and other parental eccentricities, Five-Cent Nickel reports that the new credit-card law will make it difficult or impossible for a stay-at-home parent to get a credit card in her or his name. As some readers there comment, it also will put abused women at even more risk and make it harder for them to escape their abusers. Thank you very much, O infinitely wise leaders!
Free Money Finance contemplates the possibility of living the royal life on $900 a month. Would you be willing to do what it takes to make that possible?
And speaking of parenting, Evan recently celebrated his first Father’s Day. As a dad, that is.
Mrs. Accountability ponders the art and science of filling out business deposit slips, and along the way drops a couple of amazing factoids about the strange things people will do.
Brip-Blap remarks that he feels he’s about plateaued out with blogging about PF issues. Sustainable living is beginning to interest him more…check out the cool lawn chairs he rescued and fixed up.
Check out the amazingly ambitious Crystal’s new blog—as if Budgeting in the Fun Stuff and several other enterprises weren’t enough, she’s created a new site called (ta da!) How I Make Money Blogging. LOL! Maybe I should start one called “How I Make Money Editing.” 😀
At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail and Tim are closing in on a smokin’ deal on a house. They’ve been house-hunting for a while in Phoenix’s surprisingly hot low-end market: speculators now believe prices have hit rock-bottom and now are bidding up prices in a new frenzy to get into the rental or fix-&-flip market. And here’s a new refinement of the “you can’t post here unless…” phenomenon: her host thinks I’m still logged in as my WordPress alternative to Blackboard, a site URL I do not care to publicize. Even though I’m actually logged off of WordPress.com, it insists that I have to sign up for something called “Intense Debate” to avoid posting under my course’s URL. Jeez!
Maybe I’m too cranky about this. But you know, it’s like being asked to carry around yet another “member” card to get a fair price on goods at grocery stores. My wallet is so stuffed with those things I break my fingernails on them trying to get out a credit card. I’ve stopped shopping in stores that demand that I fill out yet another form with personal information that’s none of their business. There’s a limit. And I’m at my limit for filling out forms for online sites, too. No more of that!
Welp, speaking of making money editing, now that I’ve finally shoveled the last big project off my desk, I’ve gotta spend half the day catching up with the bookkeeping and paying bills. So…it’s off to see the Wizard (the online QuickBooks wizard, that is).
