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Hello! If you came here from Cary Lockwood‘s Your Auto Network Calling All Cars, welcome to Funny about Money.

Funny is about Life, the Universe, and All That Money. We talk about subjects having to do with frugality, personal money management, and the real values that matter in life. You might enjoy these posts:

Entrepreneurs: Your Auto Network
What Is Frugality?
We Don’t Need No Steeking Laundry Detergent!
Olive Oil: The Ultimate Hair Conditioner
Who’s That Comin’ Down the Street?
Figuring Out What You Want to Be When You Grow Up: The Prioritizer
Mormons to the Rescue!
Personal Finance Nerds 2, Spendthrifts 0

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I hope you enjoy Funny and will visit and comment often. 🙂

Take time out of your busy day, or your relaxing day, to remember those whose sacrifice made it possible for us all to be busy or relaxed in freedom, and those who as we pass our day in peace at home are at the fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To get your mind around the enormity of war, take a look at this mix of image and fact by author Robert M. Poole (On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery) and design studio Rumors.

And if the numbers don’t do it for you, these images should do the trick.

Say “Thank You” to a Service Member or a Veteran Today

Today was the choir’s last performance before its summer hiatus. {sigh}

Everyone else, I expect, is happy for a break—especially the paid staff, who take the term “hard-working” to a whole new level of meaning. But I’ll miss it. When you don’t have much of a life, you tend to get invested in an activity that brings you together with a bunch of nice people.

I really will miss the superb voices of the professionals and near-professionals who form the chamber choir. They sing each Sunday during communion. It was this incredible music that drew me to the church: attending a service there is like going to a chamber music concert. Every week. All through the fall, winter, and spring.

We had a great party this afternoon, wherein the James Beard potatoes au gratin knockoff was a humble entry among some truly awesome dishes. One couple occasionally brings salmon smoked in their own cooker—it is invariably splendid. Everything was good; one broccoli salad was just delicious, and I don’t even like broccoli! And some of those people are dessert artists.

Many of them leave town for the summer, since they own vacation homes or they live somewhere else and spend the winters here. Almost all are gone for at least a week or two. But I expect some of them will show up at the regular Sunday services. I suppose if I would get myself in gear on Sundays, I could reconnect with them there over the summer.

I’m not very churchly myself. But the director said we could sit in the choir loft, if we chose, during the summer services. That would work: first because I enjoy watching the organist as she plays, and second because it’s amazing to be close to the various musicians who come in to perform. And third, because it makes it easy for me to evade going down to the communion rail. I’m superstitiously averse to drinking out of a communal chalice, and I do not believe for a moment that dipping the host in the wine is one whit more sanitary than sipping shared wine.

Really, I don’t fare well with colds or the flu—almost died from one case of influenza, and recovery takes about twice as long as it does for most people—and so I don’t do things that put me at risk. As adjunct faculty, I get no sick leave; the college docks your pay if you don’t show up, and I can’t afford to lose even one day’s shekels, much less a whole week’s worth. And when you live alone, getting sick can be difficult, because there’s no one to help you or to get you something to eat when you can’t drag yourself into the kitchen.

So that’s my excuse. 😉

Welp, it’s gunna be a long, hot summer, financially very scary. I have no idea when or how the college will pay for the online course prep and so can’t rely on that income to cover bills. While the Copyeditor’s Desk holds some funds that could cover a shortfall, I want to keep that money in the bank in case I need it this fall. There’s no guarantee that either of the eight-week courses slated for fall semester will make. If either fails to make, it’ll be a nuisance; if they’re both canceled, I’ll need every penny the S-corporation can disgorge to make ends meet. At the moment, though, it does contain enough to carry me through the fall semester, and then some. I just don’t want to diddle it away over the summer.

The aftermath of the mad shopping spree, the dental bill, and the glasses comes due with this month’s AMEX bill, speaking of diddling money away. However, it appears that diddle-it-away savings will cover those extravaganzas. So I’m pretty certain the overage collected during the cool winter months, when I didn’t have to run either the heat or the water, will carry me through the summer.

I may need some divine intervention, though. It could be worth visiting the church now and again.

Image: pgnielsen79, Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Wikipedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

🙂 MSN Smart Spending kindly republished my latest rant on consumer disservice under the title, “When Service Is Bad, Vengeance Is Sweet.” Thanks, Karen!

Paul Krugman has an interesting and kinda scary article in this morning’s Times. He points out that the biggest threat to our economy right now is not the deficit but the fact that not enough is being done to fight unemployment. Says he, the recent hiring gains have, to date, “brought back fewer than 500,000 of the 8 million jobs lost in the wake of the financial crisis.” In that department, he notes, the Administration is doing way too little.

Eight million jobs gone. Heaven help us!

Krugman says the fairest comparison between our economy and another country’s is not with Greece’s debt-ridden economy but with Japan’s, which has never fully recovered from the deflationary cycle of the 1990s. He lays the blame for Europe’s unrest over national debt issues on the establishment of the euro, whose creation, he observes, “imposed a single currency on economies that weren’t ready for such a move.”

Though you’d never know it by the grocery bills I racked up today, inflation is at a 44-year low, and that is not a good thing. Smart money, fearing deflation will extend the economic slump, is moving out of the stock market and into treasury bonds, perceived as safer than equities.

Come to think of it, this morning my financial manager e-mailed to say they’re moving my investments to a cash position. Let’s hope this time they manage to salvage some of that fund. It hadn’t regained all it lost during the crash, but it had recovered to the point that it might reasonably be expected to support me through old age.

Krugman calls for more aggressive recovery measures, but observes rightly that a new stimulus plan “would have no chance of getting through a Congress that has been spooked by the deficit hawks.”

IMHO, something far more basic is at work here.

America is not going to recover economically as long as we continue on our track toward political schism. That way is the road to ruin. The polarization of our thinking between the extreme right and the extreme left is spinning this country around in circles. Ultimately, it will destroy us. Indeed, I fear that if it continues, within a generation it will lead to uprisings, possibly even civil war.

David Brooks observes, in a column also appearing in today’s Times, that our political center presently “is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.”

In a little parable meant to elucidate the thinking of people who subscribe to the Tea Party, Brooks predicts that just throwing the rascals out and replacing them with new demagogues won’t get us far. “[Brooks’s fictional angry voter] is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. He’s going to find that he and voters like him unwittingly created a political culture in which compromise is impermissible, in which institutions are decimated by lone-wolf narcissists who have no interest in or talent for crafting legislation. Nothing will get done.”

Just so. The motto on our currency and on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum—”out of many, one”—resonates with the last great words of Patrick Henry:

“United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs.”

We’ve forgotten those words. It behooves us to remember them, before it’s too late.