Coffee heat rising

Stress control

Budgeting for a Windfall

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Things are looking up. The departmental chair has assigned me not one but two summer courses, God bless him! Even though it appears the magazine writing course will not make, that’s still seven sections for 2011 (assuming three sections materialize in the fall). Pay for seven sections amounts to $16,800, or a net of $13,272. We await the credit union’s offer in the pending renegotiation of the upside-down mortgage on the house M’hijito and I naively got ourselves into, but it can’t be any worse than we were paying before we got the loan modification at the time I was laid off. In the worst-case scenario, I would owe $9,600 in 2010. My teaching income is the sole source now of cash with which to pay my share of the payments. Think of that: $13,272 − $9,600 = $3,672, a nice little windfall!

What on earth am I going to do with $3,672?

Seriously. After a year of living frugally, I actually had to think about how I could spend an extra thirty-seven hundred bucks.

The obvious, of course, is stick it in savings! But in February another unpaid sick-leave reimbursement will come in. It will fund my Roth IRA with about $1,650 to spare; what I can’t put into the Roth will go into the brokerage fund. The net represents 31 percent of net 2011 earned income. So I don’t feel any great urgency to stash the the cash I’ve earned by actually working.

Au contraire. It’s time for me to have a life.

There are a few things I’d like to spend some money on. For example: air conditioning. I do not ever want to have to spend another summer sweltering inside my home with the thermostat turned up so high the activity of tapping on a computer keyboard breaks a sweat.

Then: water. In the summer of 2009, as some of you may recall, I kept a mostly unsuccessful container garden under the orange trees. Because plants in pots have to be watered every day and because I could afford to be lazy while I had a job, I would carry the hose to the pots and set the timer for ten or fifteen minutes…every single morning. The container garden was a fail, but the water bill was cause for celebration down at the city water & sewer department: $214 in July 2009! That’s about $90 over my water budget.

The $214 water bill, as it develops, produced nothing that summer, but it did buy a fantastic bumper crop of glorious oranges. By last February the trees were loaded with big, juicy fruit as sweet as candy.

Last July’s water bill was a far more  modest $96.10. I shut off the drip watering system, dragged the hose to the landscape plants, let the xeric planting in front go without, and most certainly did not indulge in container gardening. Or much of any other kind of gardening, come to think of it.

The result: Tiny little parched fruit on the orange trees. This spring’s crop, what there is of it, is hardly usable.

The fruit took a beating from the hail storm. About a third of the oranges dropped off the trees; maybe half the surviving fruit was all bruised up, left with brown scars on the orange skins. The fruit that managed to cling to the branches is stunted—no larger than a tennis ball, and many pieces smaller than that. While most of the surviving pieces are reasonably juicy, they’re not very sweet. Some are almost flavorless.

Obviously, orange trees need a lot of water to thrive. And since I adore those oranges, I want them to thrive.

The highest electric bill of last summer was $239.08, which was $14 over budget. It was hotter than the hubs of Hades in my house—truly uncomfortable, enough to start me thinking about moving away from Arizona. Supposedly the new hyper-efficient air conditioning will hold the power bills down a bit this year.

Right. I’ll believe that when I see it. The first power bill with that unit in place came to $85.64; the January 2010 bill was $104.34. Difference was only twenty bucks…but then, we didn’t have a hard frost last winter. Until the summer bills come in, we can safely assume the new Goodman will cost about as much to operate as the old Goettl unit did.

So, I figure that to cool the house to a reasonably comfortable state (say, no hotter than 76 or 78 degrees) and to irrigate those citrus trees adequately will take about an extra $300 per month.

Okay. That’s $900 for the three hottest months of the year.

Now. I need a pair of shoes, and I wish to shed the Costco jeans and start wearing some decent clothes. That’ll be $150 for one new pair of pain-frees and let’s say $200 per shopping spree in the midsummer and post-Christmas 2011 sales: $150 + $400 = $550 to upgrade the wardrobe.

The house needs a lot of work. To repair the foundation crack on the west side, repaint the sun-blasted gables, touch up eroded exterior paint, paint the office door (a job that never did get done!), spray-paint the grungy interior of the garage, and build a French drain to direct ponding rainwater water away from the patio will cost about $500.

I need a new pair of progressive shades in the frame style I favor, which I’ve already ordered. Price tag: $720.

And this last week I made a surprising discovery: going to concerts makes me feel happy. Yes. Very happy. Music tameth the neurotic beast. A week of attending Bach concerts every second day left me feeling an unaccustomed calm, unruffled by the usual minor aggravations. As you can imagine, I wish to continue this.

Season tickets to chamber music are $200 for eight concerts, which works out to a fairly reasonable $25 per performance. When you buy them one at a time, it’s $30 apiece. The Downtown Chamber Series is only $10, but they don’t do many performances. The Phoenix Chorale is doing four performances this season plus several special events; prices are $5 less for us old bats, and you can attend their rehearsals for free. The Louise Kerr Cultural Center has a jazz series; price is about the same. The Desert Botanical Garden has its “Music in the Garden” series, mostly jazz. Plus the community college and the university music departments mount performances all the time, at very reasonable prices. So there’s a lot going on. Five hundred dollars would buy two series and entry to a number of miscellaneous events.

Soooo…. What would this spend it or bust budget look like?

Holy mackerel! I can’t even think up enough ways to spend the extra money!

Whence this spectacular new lucre? Well, it’s happening because I finally gave up trying to avoid drawing down retirement savings. The nest egg recovered pretty well in 2010, to everyone’s amazement. Really, I don’t think the boys down at Stellar believed, in their heart of hearts, that the market would come back the way it has. On their advice, I tried my level best to get by on just Social Security and the piddling $14,160 that Social Security allowed me to earn from teaching last year. That was difficult; it just wasn’t enough for me to live on.

With happy days here again (except for the 17 percent of Americans who remain unemployed or underemployed, myself among them), we’ve changed the strategy. Right now I’m spending down the post-tax savings I had accrued before GDU laid me off, to the tune of about $1,100 a month. This should last until September, at which point I’ll start a 3 percent drawdown from retirement savings. That plus Social Security amounts to just enough to meet my base monthly needs. So, everything I earn teaching can be used to meet expenses beyond bare survival.

My initial thought was that the teaching income—virtually all of it—would go to pay the mortgage on the downtown house. And that would have been so under the onerous earnings limitation imposed by Social Security in 2010.

However, in 2011, I’m free at last of the earnings limit.  That allows me to take on two extra courses, about the max the community colleges will hire me to teach. Net income from two extra courses is almost $3,800.

If a miracle happens and the magazine-writing course makes, then I would net about $5,570 more than needed to pay the mortgage.

It’s a miracle!

Now, if I saved the money instead of spending it on myself, in three years I’d have enough to buy a brand-new car in cash, despite the low trade-in value of a decade-old gas-guzzling minivan.

But I figure…what the hell. Since I can’t dream up enough ways to diddle it all away, unspent cash is going to accrue in savings willy-nilly. My car has 100,000 miles on it. The mechanic par extraordinaire thinks it will run to 150,000 miles. That’s five more years. By then, we should have much better choices of fuel-efficient vehicles, and some of them will be a year or two old, available at post-depreciation prices. Hang onto the Dog Chariot until it’s ready to fall apart, and I’ll only have to buy one more car during my remaining lifetime. How to go about paying for this new vehicle is a problem that will have to solve itself when the time comes.

As for how we’ll cover the cost of the mortgage when I can no longer work—about four years from now, by my estimate—fifteen or twenty grand in savings would delay but not solve that problem. The mortgage also is something we’ll have to deal with in due time.

Image: Mitsubishi Electric Car. Tony Hisgett. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

School’s out! (…almost…)

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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.

bicycle

Images:

Nikolai Petrovitch Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Calculations. Public Domain.
Funny about Money, Snapshot of Purple Bicycle. You want that photo? Feel free!

Decluttering the In-box

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Okay, now that the desk is shoveled off, the question is how to shovel out the incoming clutter in the e-mail in-box. Am I the only employee or quasi-employee of an institution that engages in an ongoing campaign to strafe the entire planet with pointless, irrelevant messages? You can’t block them, because some of them are very relevant, indeed. But those relevant messages come along once every three months. In between times, you’re hitting the “delete” button thousands of times.

Truly. Over a hundred messages come in every single day.

• The menu for the campus cafeteria at Phoenix College, where I do not now teach and have not taught for a good ten years.

• A chatty P.R. newsletter emanating from the Phoenix College president’s office.

• The weekly crime report from the Phoenix College campus cops.

• The program guide for the district’s low-wattage local cable station.

• Endless, endless, endless pitches for the district’s United Way campaign.

• Announcements for various public service courses and minicourses at campuses around the Valley (a “caregiver class” at Scottsdale; “Safe Space” training at Phoenix; Life-long Learning: “Preparing for Finals”).

• Reminders to hourly workers to submit their time & labor reports.

• A “Happy Thanksgiving” message from the district’s employee store (and BTW, they’re offering “special discounts for our valued MCCCD employees!”)

• A bottomless pit of employee training sessions (two sessions to help with the FSA online enrollment process, whatever that is).

• Announcements for stage, open-air, and athletic performances at every campus across the Valley.

• And scores of e-mails from individuals who just want to share with every employee in the vast district: someone sent a photo of Saturn; a coach crowed that the Paradise Valley girl’s soccer team won a championship and a dozen people sent kudos to every single soul on the college’s mailing list. Just this minute, one of my colleagues sent photos of a trip to Greece to everyone at his college.

Some of this stuff is apparently going out to more than one mailing list, and lucky  me, I somehow got on two of them. About half of it arrives in duplicate.

Sifting through all this trash is amazingly time-consuming. You can’t just point and click “delete.” Your cursor has to come to rest on every. single. message, and of course when it does it opens the damn thing. When you’re busy and you have, say, 25 more papers to grade (as I do today), even a couple seconds per message is a distraction and a minor aggravation. I have enough minor aggravations in my day, thank you.

An occasional message is one that needs attention, but not now. If I let it sit on the server until I get time to deal with it, then it quickly sinks beneath the waves of the oncoming tsunami of junkmail.

MacMail allows you to sort incoming messages into various subdirectories, including the trash. If you send something to the “trash” directory on Apple’s servers, it gets deleted automatically every few days, which is nice. However, some of it, I don’t want to have deleted. The guy who sends out his hobby photos, for example, occasionally emits an important message that I don’t want to lose. And among all the chaff that comes from the district are job announcements. Yes. Announcements for real, paying jobs. I still do apply for full-time positions, even though it’s a forlorn hope.

The aggravation rises to the “major” level, though, when the confusion spawned by the constant static leads you to overlook messages that you do want to receive: student papers, e-mails from colleagues that matter (like the occasional valuable messages from the photo buff), incoming from clients, reminders from your calendar.

My answer to this conundrum has been to set up a passel of subsidiary in-boxes, direct certain classes of messages to those, and then check them every few days. If nothing that matters appears, I can then Command-A to select all and send them into the ether.

Most of these sub-mailboxes hold messages I need to hang onto for various reasons. E-mail to and from problem students, for example, needs to be kept until there’s no risk of any later repercussions. Some messages from clients ought not to go away for awhile. Some of the blog carnivals are now set up to forward submissions to the host’s personal in-box, an awful nuisance (and one reason,in addition to the astonishing workload, that I’ve quit hosting so often).

Two or three weeks ago I started marking e-mail addresses that send me totally irrelevant messages so that everything that comes from them goes straight to the trash on Apple’s server. This derails a lot…but it’s quite a chore, since an enormous number of offices and individual employees in the District send out nothing but trash. I’ve now marked fifty-six senders’ e-mail addresses this way! And more keep sifting in.

That doesn’t count the general announcements that are likely to contain job ads, which go into the “CC Announcements” box.

These automatic side-tracking boxes add to the drag-and-drop categories, such as “Act on These ASAP,” where I can stash things that I need or may need until I can get to them.

The goal is to leave the in-box only for those incoming messages that matter and can be dealt with right now and then deleted. This plan is working to get some of the trash out from under my nose. But it’s not perfect:

And I need to get up, feed the dog, feed myself, and start reading papers. 🙄

Busting a Gut to Get a Vacation

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Workin' in the salt mine...

Am I the only unemployed person on the planet who’s working like an animal so as to get a break from working like an animal?

Under normal circumstances, I’ve been working 14 to 17 hours a day on my various underpaid enterprises. Since Fall semester began, I’ve had to let FaM slide, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the work I was doing on the blog and keep up with three classes and edit arcane copy from the academic set. It’s all I can do to crank one idle essay, not very personal-financeish, each day; I’ve minimized the Alexis toolbar; and I never did figure out how on earth to get into the Yakezi site, so I’ve presumably fallen off that outfit’s rolls. People keep tweeting me that they’re following me on Twitter, and if they’re clearly PF bloggers, I’ll return the favor…but who has time to post on Twitter and Facebook???

{whine!}

So, by way of resolving this whine, I’m determined to give myself a vacation during the winter break, instead of spending the entire month between mid-December and mid-January working nonstop to prepare courses. It takes days to get one of these things lined up, each day planned for, a 15-page syllabus written, a three-page calendar constructed, and everything set up in the endlessly difficult Blackboard.

I’m almost done with the spring English 102 sections, both of which are in-class face-to-face sections. I’ve come up with a number of strategies:

1. Make almost all the learning exercises and quizzes zero-credit affairs. Tell students it’s their responsibility to learn the material, that they’re expected to demonstrate mastery of the skills and knowledge imparted, and that if they expect to get decent grades on the papers they’ll be well-advised to do these things.

This will relieve me of a vast amount of ditzy grading and score-keeping. It cuts the number of grade-book columns from twenty to nine.

2. Convert the exercises and quizzes from open-book homework to in-class activities. Have students spend half the endless class period working them and then use the rest of the time to discuss them.

This turns every no-credit exercise into about 75 teaching moments. It relieves me from having to figure out how to keep them entertained to fill 40 hours with lecture.

3. See to it that the only graded assignments are those that are required by the district: the drafts, the peer reviews, and the final papers, representing the so-called “recursive process” applied to three required papers.

Why give myself extra work if it’s not required? Especially since I’m not paid to do extra work!

4. Load the final paper, which is 2,500 words long, with three times the credit of the two shorter papers, each of which is 750 words. Their final paper will carry 300 points and the two lesser papers 100 points.

Believe me when I say this will get their attention.

5. Require that drafts for the two shorter papers be at least 300 words long, and the draft for the final paper be at least 500 words.

This will eliminate the conundrum of what to do with students who slop together half a paragraph or a crude outline and expect me to waste my time assessing it.

6. Up the score value of the peer review exercise to 50 points, the same as the drafts themselves. Require students to follow a page-long set peer review guidelines to get full credit.

This will make it clear that I don’t have to assess the classic one-line “peer review” that says, succinctly, “This is very good. I saw a few grammer [sic] mistakes.”

7. Create a simplified grading rubric for drafts and peer reviews:

50 points: author does an honest job of filling the assignment; peer reviewer follows the entire set of guidelines.

40 points: author comes somewhere close to 300 words and at least looks like she or he is trying to get a decent start on the assignment; peer reviewer follows most of the guidelines.

35 points: half-baked job.

30 points: inadequate, but at least the person turned in a few words.

0 points: couldn’t be bothered to turn in anything.

8. Lose the computers delivered to the classroom. Limit in-class computer activities to drafting and peer reviewing, cutting the number of computer days from thirty-two to  nine.

Having laptops delivered to the classroom turned out to be quite a hassle. And if the class consists entirely of 18- and 19-year-olds and does not have the counterbalance of older students, laptops in the classroom represent an invitation to party.

9. Remove all due dates from listings and descriptions of assignments online.

Contrary to what we’re taught by our course designers and urged to do by the administration, posting elaborate “modules” does little for the students, who don’t read them, and creates vast amounts of extra work for instructors. To recycle a Blackboard course, you have to spend untold numbers of hours combing through each section, subsection, and sub-subsection finding and changing the dates you stupidly inserted.

After this, there’ll be only two places where dates will be visible: the syllabus, and a week-by-week calendar. I have to rewrite those each semester anyway. This will make it simple to recycle courses; effectively all I’ll have to do is copy content from one BB shell to the next and then add the current syllabus and calendar.

10. Lose the endlessly annoying G.D. Blackboard quizzes! Convert them to ungraded in-class exercises.

These hateful things, while they conveniently provide machine-generated grades, are difficult or impossible to copy over and take hour after hour after interminable mind-numbing hour to reproduce each semester. Turning them into hand-outs to be used as the basis of in-class discussion will bring a stop, also, to the quibbling over scores on the things.

11. Combine the entire semester’s worth of hand-outs, quizzes, exercises, syllabus, and calendar into one gigantic PDF package, and send it to the copy center before the start of the semester.

This will eliminate countless fillings-out of copy center forms and countless trudges up and down the stairs to the copy center.

I can’t even count the number of  hours I’ve spent trying to accomplish these steps—hours crammed in around the other hours devoted to keeping up with the courses, editing, and blogging. But I think it’ll be worth it: massive simplification should cut the amount of time I have to spend on teaching next semester, with little or no effect on the students’ learning. If anything, it may actually improve learning, since the students will have to focus on learning exercises in-class, rather than flaking off with them whenever they feel like it. Over time, too, it will cut the amount of work needed for course prep, since it effectively puts the courses in tin cans—all I’ll need to do in the future is write a calendar and change the due dates in the syllabus.

Hope it works.

Meanwhile…time to grade papers!

Image: Turda Salt Mine, Turda, Poland. Roamata. Public Domain.

Stress Control Redux

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In another two and a half hours, I’ve got to traipse over to the Mayo to begin a round of what promises to be increasingly invasive testing. What joy.

My doc and his bouncing young resident think what ails me could be any of a number of things: an H. pylori infection, acid reflux, pancreatitis, impending liver failure. Some of the possibilities make being infected with the first bacterium proven to cause cancer look good. Oh, and by the way, there’s this high blood pressure issue…

Whatever it is, I’ve found it seems to relate directly to stress. The more harassed I feel, the more upset the stomach gets, and vice versa. After spending a day hanging out first with KJG and then with SDXB, essentially doing nothing but relaxing and chatting, I suddenly felt a lot better. Then, a couple of days ago, a stress-filled day that included meeting with doctors who kept me sitting in an examining room twiddling my thumbs for almost an hour left me with a volcano in my gut.

Here’s what Dr. Funny thinks: Since the beginning of the summer, I have been so stressed worrying about money and working endless hours for little or no pay, it’s maxed out my ability to cope.

Making it through the summer without enough cash coming in to cover base expenses was very difficult, indeed. From pinching pennies all spring, I had enough saved from teaching to pay the bills in May, June, July, and August, but only just. By the beginning of summer, the account that held spending money had run dry. Although I was assigned to teach three sections in the fall, arranging them in three eight-week sessions (one the first half of the semester and two in the second half) meant that in late August and September, too little would come in to pay the bills. Social Security and teaching income together were simply not enough to live on.

Then when Social Security pulled the stunt of withholding an entire month’s benefit check for the crime of earning $340 more than allowed, that pushed me to the point of not being able to cope at all. You can tear your hair trying to figure out how to get by only so many hours before you go bald.

Add to that the fact that I spend way, way, way too many hours in front of the computer, most of them pursuing sub-minimum wage pay.

Online courses are obscenely time-consuming. I am sick and tired of fiddling with Blackboard, which is about the most cumbersome bloatware this side of Microsoft. Nay! Blackboard makes Microsoft look thin and lithe. At least MS Office works. Most of the time. If I had ever tried to keep track of the number of hours wasted screwing around with Blackboard, by now I would have lost track. To say nothing of having lost my mind.

Yesterday I worked about three hours on blogging—starting at three in the morning, wrote and fiddled around until about 6:00 a.m. This work earned about $9 an hour. The day before yesterday, the site earned $.02. I wrote two posts that day; neither was very long, but taken together they probably took an hour or more to write, edit, and revise. Yes. That’s a pay rate of, at best, two cents an hour. On average I’ve earned $2.25 an hour at blogging over the past two days.

I blog because I like to blog, not to earn a living. So you could say it’s all very nice to earn a bit of pocket change for what started out as a hobby. Still…I’m spending a lot of time on this for very little return.

Teaching, as spotty as it is, comes closer to providing a reliable income than anything other than Social Security. But by its nature, adjunct pay does not cover the bills. It’s irregular and unpredictable. But the worst part of it is, you spend many, many, many hours on the job for which you are flat not paid.

This summer the college kindly paid me a stipend for preparing an online course in magazine writing. The amount was the equivalent of pay for a three-credit course. That was very nice, but I didn’t get the full amount until after I had jumped through endless hoops, some of which were real time-wasters. With the exception of about two weeks in May, I worked almost full-time on this task through the entire summer. It should take about a week and a half of full-time work to do a semester’s course prep for something you haven’t taught recently. Although I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth—pay for course prep is largely unheard-of in academic circles—the fact is that because of the way the money was paid, it didn’t help me when I most needed it. Despite working very hard on a tedious job all summer long, I ended up with little to help me get through that long dry spell.

Because I sit in front of the computer from three, four, or five in the morning all the way through to eight or nine at night, I never get any exercise. Occasionally I walk the dog. I try to do that twice a day, but as a practical matter I’m doing well to get to it once a day. And during the summer it was way too hot to take her out during the daylight hours. In the mornings I was working–I would start on average around 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and not lift my head until 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., at which point I had to cope with the pool and the yard before it got impossibly hot. By the time that was done and the dog and I were fed, it was impossibly hot. By 10:00 p.m., when I would ordinarily quit working, I often was too tired to drag myself and the hound around the block.

We’re doing a little better now that the weather is cooler. But a stroll around the block does not make it as exercise! I need to get back on the mountain—or, since the city is going to start charging a stiff fee for the privilege of parking outside the public parks, over to a neighborhood at the base of Squaw Peak, where I can walk on hilly streets. The dog will have to stay home, because she can’t keep up with a fast walk of two or three miles.

That’s going to necessitate a major change in habits. Driving across town and spending an hour or 90 minutes charging around, then having to race home and wash the sweat off and fix breakfast will blow away my mornings.

Here are my proposed strategies:

1. Arrange a 3 percent drawdown from savings in an amount that, combined with Social Security, will cover base expenses twelve months a year. That one is already done.

2. Use teaching income solely to cover my share of the mortgage on the downtown house. This allows me to pay for that without having to incur still more taxes by drawing down an extra $9600 a year from my IRAs.

3. Glom onto any leftover teaching income for diddle-it-away change…and use it. Spend some money on concerts, day trips, and yea verily…even recreational shopping.

4. Also with this extra money (assuming there is any), run the air conditioner at a tolerable level next summer. I do not think I can bear the prospect of spending another 115-degree summer cooped up inside a miserably uncomfortable house.

5. Further simplify courses. Make all nonessential exercises ungraded in-class exercises. Reduce the number of papers that have to be read and graded to the three or four required assignments plus their drafts.

6. Quit sitting in front of the computer all day long. In fact, do not even turn it on before about 10:00 a.m.

7. Set MacMail to divert the vast amount of spam that pours in from the community college district by blacklisting offending addresses, thereby reducing the surprising amount of time consumed by deleting the endless irrelevant messages.

8. Find ways to reduce the amount of time spent at blogging, or to write several days’ posts at once.

That’s about it. Not having to worry quite so much about money should help a lot. But to that, I’ve got to add getting some exercise and building a more normal life.

Some changes made tooodayyy….

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Whew! What a week this has been! I about swooned under the workload, was reduced to tears this morning while contemplating my $448 (!) paycheck, finally came to and decided that there’s gotta be some financial and sanity-preserving changes made around here. Today!

Awoke at 3 a.m., stumbled across the hall into the office, and plopped in front of the computer, there to resume editing the copy that wore me to a frazzle last night. By 9:00, the phone was ringing, the e-mail binging, and neither Cassie nor I had had a bite to eat. Well, I swallowed a fake Pepcid around 4, but I don’t suppose that counts as “food,” eh?

Another bouncing young psychologist has found me and has been clinging to my skirts (well, blue-jean cuffs) as she struggles her way through the grueling process of applying for a clinical internship. This is a gawdawful rite of passage that happens as they’re trying to wrap  up the dissertation and engaged in research projects or assistantships. The competition for internships is so fierce and the standards so high that they live in fear of being turned down, so they churn out dozens of application packages, which are large and filled with arcane technical reports intended to show what they can do. Each package is prefaced with an elaborate cover letter, exquisitely tailored to its target institution, which is supposed to be two pages long but which requires so much information that squeezing it in to two pages is excruciating.

This project would be torment for a native speaker. But if the soon-to-be doctor’s first language is something other than English, the challenge is just horrific.

So I’ve been struggling with the client all week. Where I work 14 to 16 hours a day, she works 24. Last night we both collapsed into our respective sacks on our respective sides of the country at about the same time.

Meanwhile the li’l 101s are shoveling incomprehensible papers in this direction. Twenty narratives, penned by authors who express a certain puzzlement at the instructions, reside on the Blackboard server awaiting my attention.

Later!

This morning after reading a couple more client documents in their second or third iterations, I was forced to pay the AMEX bill. This caused me to look at my dismal finances and to be reminded of a few inconvenient truths; to wit:

• I’ve already eaten $1,173 into my Absolute Catastrophe savings, and there’s no end in sight.
• The $265 pool maintenance bill did nothing to help that situation.
• A paycheck of $448 does nothing to help the situation, either.
• Nor does reading and rereading and re-rereading vast swaths of arcana at $4.50 per single-spaced page (don’t ask!).
• Although some pay periods bring in plenty of cash to pay the bills, many do not.
• The combination of eight-week and sixteen-week sections magnifies this phenomenon no end.
• It drives me screaming bat-shit crazy not to know from month to month how much net pay will come in.
• Three months without teaching pay in the summer and another month without pay in midwinter are more than the money left over from decent pay periods will cover. Over 12 months, I’m running at a loss.
• By the time I’ve worked from three or four or five in the morning till ten or later at night, I’ve racked up about 50 cents an hour for my elaborately refined skills.
• The scheme to defer drawing down 4 percent of retirement savings for a year or two—or preferably till I reach age 70—comes under the heading of “forlorn hope.”
• Sitting in front of a computer moving little other than my fingers from before dawn till long after dusk is making me flicking miserable.
• The stress of worrying about how I’m going to make ends meet is making me physically sick.

This stuff has gotta stop.

Yesterday at the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the gents started talking about travel and play and life, the universe, and all that. The general consensus, led by Jerry Rose—a former teacher who decided there was more to life than teaching and so went into the travel business—was that you’d better live life now, because there may not be a later. This conversation was happening after I’d put in two hours of work before leaving the house at 6:30 a.m. to head over to the confab…

Listening to them talk, I thought, I need a life!

First off: get rid of the money worries. It’s time to give up on trying to preserve and build capital. Called the esteemed financial manager and arranged a meeting. Trotted over to his office.

There I explained that I need a minimum of $1,093 a month, net. Combined with the munificent $957 a month from Social Security, this will cover my basic bills, even in the hottest, most utility-heavy summer.

No problem, said he. This can be accomplished with a 3 percent drawdown. Since my retirement investments, which he and his colleagues have put into a wide variety of instruments (some of them calculated to be inflation-protective), are earning between 5 and 7 percent just now, he notes that this should not eat into principal. He remarked that I could draw down 4 or 5 percent without causing any harm.

With a base, steady income of $2,050, anything I earn through teaching, editing, or blogging is pure gravy. It makes a $448 paycheck look good! In a month, that’s an extra $896 on top of what I need to live!

Eight hunnert and ninety-six dollars would buy a lot of clothes at J. Jill’s. It might even take me to Santa Fe for a weekend. 😉

Knowing from the git-go that there’s going to be enough cash in my checking account to pay the bills is a huge relief. And it’s mighty nice to know that I can get there without leaving myself a pauper at the age of 90, should I live that long.

Welp, money may not buy happiness, but it’s about to buy a nice chunk of stress relief. What this means is that I don’t have to teach two or three sections of composition a semester. Hell, I don’t have to teach any sections if I don’t feel like it.

Whatever I do earn teaching can go to paying the mortgage on our upside-down house, to setting aside some money toward the next car (which I’m going to have to buy one of these days), and to buying something nice for myself and M’hijito now and again. Probably I needn’t teach any more than one section to pull that off. I’m thinking what I’ll do is limit my course load to two and then just take whatever comes along. If our chair comes up with a summer session course for me, that will be nice. If he doesn’t, that’s fine, too.

So, that should help a great deal.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with this life I’m shaking free.

Image:

Charles Sprague Pearce, Detail from Labor mural in lunette from the Family and Education series by Charles Sprague Pearce. North Corridor, Great Hall, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Public domain.