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At the downtown house, Richard, intrepid proprietor of Dick’s Landscaping, has set his crew to ripping out the neglected debris and broken sidewalks that are the front and back yards and installing a minimalist desert landscape, the least we can get by with and still end up with a pleasing, low-water, low-maintenance yard. Dick’s has done the landscaping for my present home and for the last house I lived in, and in both cases they did a top-flight job.

I was going to have Gerardo do this, but given his tendency to show up whenever he feels like it and his taste in shady employees, I thought better of it. One of us would have had to be present at all times to be sure they didn’t do something goofy, and neither of us can be away from our jobs for a week or two…especially when part of that week or two is likely to be spent waiting for him to not appear on the job. Gerardo would have been a lot cheaper, but you get what you pay for.

On the other hand…  God Herself would have done the work for less than Richard charges. I managed to get him to come down $1,000 off his original bid, but despite the fact that AMEX charges him 11 percent for the privilege of letting me rack up the $12,000 price on my card, he wouldn’t give us a discount if we paid in cash.

Yeah, you read that right: Twelve grand. It’s actually cheap, believe it or not. You can expect to spend upwards of $20,000 to install desert landscaping in a yard that’s already infested with grass. M’hijito and I will split the cost 50-50. By putting it on my American Express card and paying it off in cash at the end of the month, we’ll “earn” (snark!) a munificent $120 kickback from AMEX, nothing like a 5 or 10 percent discount off Richard’s fee. Oh well. It’s better than a whack upside the head. Marginally.

Drawing $6,000 out of my credit-union savings account will avoid having to create a taxable event to get my hands on the cash, but it will drop my short-term emergency fund to $1,100, something that I don’t like at all. Well—not literally: that’s the balance after withholding $2,500 for to cover COBRA between canning day and my 65th birthday. If we’re wildly lucky and the State of Arizona doesn’t screw its employees on health insurance this fall (a very long shot, indeed: with the legislature balancing its budget on the backs of our children and the State’s lowest-paid workers, you can be sure the screwing will be deep and thorough), the discounted COBRA actually will be less than Medicare will cost me. So I should be able to cover that from cash flow. That means the post-landscaping emergency fund will actually amount to about $3600.

Between now and December 30 I will deposit another $2,020 into that account from my regular paychecks. And if my figures are right, I should net about $5,000 from the community college moonlighting. So that will bring the actual canning-day fund to $10,620, more than enough to serve as the cushion I believe I’ll need during the lean summer months. Even if I have to spend the $2,500 on COBRA, as I expect will happen, enough will be left to get by.

And that’s a conservative figure. We get a so-called “extra” paycheck this month; that will add another $1,000 to savings. And if somehow I can make GDU pay my back vacation pay in my last paycheck (apparently they’re supposed to do that, but I know they delayed paying it to My Bartleby for two or three pay periods after she left), that will be another $3,100 net, for a potential December 31 total of $14,720. Soooo…. I don’t feel too worried.

For our money, we will get a very large project done, with Richard and his foreman riding herd on the workmen instead of me having to do it. Also, at least one of these guys is a skilled mason—he built the courtyard in my front yard and did a gorgeous job of it. The plans include…

• Jackhammer out the decrepit walkway in front
• Shovel out all the parched bermudagrass and berserk weeds, front, back, both sides
• Remove a large volunteer lantana blocking the side gate
• Haul away the debris
• Grade the decrepit driveway
• Use our 15-cent-apiece bricks to build a patio around the front door and a pretty winding walkway from the patio to the street
• Build a low block wall around the new front patio; plaster and paint it; cap it with red brick to match the house
• Install two wrought-iron gates in this wall
• Plant a good-sized desert willow in front, to shade the living-room window
• Plant two bottle trees next to the west wall, to shade the westside master bedroom
• Build a brick patio outside the French doors we installed in the back bedroom
• Build a brick patio in the far northeast corner of the backyard, designed as a sitting area
• Brick another area for outdoor cooking, to accommodate two barbecue/smokers with space for a couple of cooks to play with their food
• Plant Sonoran emerald paloverdes to shade each of these patios
• Plant clump grasses and other easy-on-the-eyes ornamentals around the two sitting areas
• Plant a Mexican lime and a Texas ebony in back
• Build planting beds around the existing patio and along the back wall
• Install drip-and-bubbler watering systems front and back
• Provide extra lines for us to connect drip lines as we wish to add new plantings in the future
• Lay down anti-weed fabric everywhere
• Lay down 75 tons of quarter-minus, front and back, also paving the driveway with quarter-minus

The only thing we had to cut to save the thousand bucks was the proposed flagstone walkway between the house and the back sitting area. This is something we can do ourselves, for a lot less than $1,000. Especially if we can work another estate sale bargain on the flags.

Could we do all this work ourselves and save about 60 percent of the cost?

Well…in a word, no. We could in theory do some of it. But most of it is way too heavy for us to manage, and although I’ve operated a tractor, neither of us knows how to operate a backhoe.

I have laid bricks, and I know how to build a serviceable patio. However, I was 25 when I built my last patio. I’m now almost 65. Do I really want to haul, spread, grade, and tamp several tons of sand and lay 1,500 bricks (and then some)? No. Could I even do it, at my age? Highly doubtful. Furthermore, I do not know how to build, plaster, and cap a block wall, and I don’t want to learn.

M’hijito works a truly miserable job that sends him home worn out, and so far he has shown no inclination nor talent for physical labor. As a practical matter, he’s not going to do it. So, to the extent it gets done, we either hire someone else to do it or his doddering mother and her campesino yard guy do it. I do not even want to think about the characters El Campesino is likely to trot in to spread 75 tons of quarter-minus and dig holes to plant six 24-gallon trees. Argh!

So: no, we could/would not do it ourselves. I think this project will be worth it in the long run, since one of us will be living in that house far into the foreseeable future.

This week I submitted posts to only two carnivals: Best of Money and Money Stories. Didn’t make it in to the elite ten at BoM, but Green Panda Treehouse kindly included “Other People’s Pets” in this week’s Money Stories Carnival.

A bunch of good stories surfaced this week. Among them:

• Free Money Finance’s story of his (former, I hope) maniac boss
• Money Smart Life is fighting a telephone prankster and figures the war will cost some money.
• My Dollar Plan’s guest author Todd Campanella describes the benefits of delayed consumption.

Today MSN Smart Spending also featured a version of the other people’s pets story, where it stirred up some skeptical commentary. Thanks again, Karen!

And also today, It’s Frugal Being Green ran Funny’s guest post, an update on the food futures project.

Funny will host the Carnival of Money stories on August 3. Remember to send your posts to the carnival’s submissions page before then!

Comes a new electric bill in the mail. You may recall that last month I had another kitten because the revered Salt River Project presented a bill that was $37 higher than the June 2008 bill, when (all things being equal) last winter’s 3 percent rate hike should have delivered a $13 increase. Two factors could have had to do with this: a new programmable thermostat and a new chest freezer, which resided in the ovenlike garage.

The thermostat had been set to 80 degrees during the day and 76 at night. After perusing June’s $158 bill, I decided to reset the thermostat to 82 during the day, leaving it at 76 for sleeping. And I put Gerardo the Lawn Dude up to moving the freezer inside the house.

This month’s bill, at $165.78, came in $36 under the July 2008 bill of $201.92! Hallelujah!

I still don’t know which circumstance drove up the May bill—fricasseed freezer or programmable thermostat. Probably it was a bit of both.

June was fairly mild: only a couple of 110-degree days. July is the cruelest month here. This weekend we’re supposed to see temperatures of 114 to 116. That’s fairly typical. So, the bill that arrives in August covers the hottest period of the year. Last August’s bill was $229.54.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Tuesday I reprogrammed the thermostat to run at 82 degrees from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (about when I just can’t stand it another minute); then drop to 78 degrees between 5:00 and 10:00 p.m.; and then to bring the temp down to 76 degrees between 10:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., the period when I usually start trying to get to sleep. After I should be asleep, then the temperature goes back up to 78.

Chances that I’ll actually sleep through a 78-degree night, of course, are nil. This morning I was up at 4:30, feeling just slightly too damn hot. But what the heck. If a miracle happens and I manage to drop off around 10, that’s 6 1/2 hours, bordering on adequate.

If this scheme keeps the August bill under about $225, I’ll be happy. SRP is going to raise rates again in November, so any cuts I can make now will just keep my head above water next summer. After that? Well…after “retirement,” move to Prescott, I guess, where temperatures are milder.

M’hijito called yesterday afternoon and invited me to drive out to the new westside Lee Lee, a long way from the central city but probably not as far as the original location in Chandler. Lee Lee is a large, interesting Asian supermarket, where fish are sold fresh-caught from huge tanks, the produce department offers treats you’ll never see at Safeway, two long aisles are filled with exotic cooking gear, and ethnic foods are organized by country.

He wanted to buy a mah-jongg table. We found one, but, being a chip off the old block, he felt $60 was more than he wanted to pay. He’ll be back.

While we were there, we picked up a variety of wonders, such as chunky anemone-shaped Japanese mushrooms, Madras curry powder, coconut milk, Philippine mangoes, and a variety of Asian snacks and candies that made M’hijito nostalgic for his old neighborhood in San Francisco. From there, it was on to Costco.

Interestingly, at about the same moment, Carrie over at It’s Frugal Being Green was making the Costco rounds in her precincts. As part of her project to find the best meat at the best price, she had already pretty well decided that the venerable warehouse store does mighty well in this department. Lo! What should we each discover in our separate treks: Costco’s got prime beef! Holy mackerel!

Well, at the Phoenix store, the choice was limited to a few packages of prime New York steaks, and they were frozen solid. They did look pretty rich: so baroquely marbled they must have contained as much fat as protein. Though the price was not off the scale, we were a little put off by their being frozen (like we don’t freeze the stuff after we get it home?). However, when M’hijito and I compared them with the ribeye steaks, we concluded that the choice quality ribeyes showed about as much marbling as the prime cuts…and they were two bucks a pound cheaper.

So, we settled for the middle-brow stuff.

That notwithstanding, I spent about $105 at the two stores yesterday. Not good, since I had exactly $2.82 left in this week’s microbudget, to last until tomorrow. Strictly speaking.

Not so bad, though, if you look at it from the new angle I cooked up: by spreading extraordinary expenses over the entire month-long budget. From that point of view, I could have spent almost $125 and still be OK.

So…did I go over budget? Well, I think not: as a practical matter, there was plenty of money in the month’s budget to buy a few food items this week. And I didn’t buy anything I didn’t need: the main reason I went into Costco was to pick up some orange juice and frozen strawberries, staples of my breakfast fare. I’d run my supply of meat down to nothing, so it made sense to pick up a package of ribeyes. I needed fruit, so the mangoes from Lee Lee and the Costco peaches (split with M’hijito) also were reasonable purchases. The only thing I didn’t really need were Costco’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans…but hey! Buttercup yellow! When would a person ever see buttercup jeans that fit, ever again?

I like the idea of spreading extraordinary costs over an entire month. Both unusual bills, $243.68 for the incredible bargain on 1,440 paving bricks and $188 for the speed trap ticket, came up in the first week. Dividing each figure by four and debiting each microbudget for the respective figures—$47 and $60.92—reduces the amount available for each week but leaves plenty of cash in each week for ordinary expenses. Trying to take those amounts out of the week in which they occurred runs the first microbudget deep into the red and, when the red ink is carried over into the second week, leaves too little in that week’s microbudget to live on comfortably.

All in all, a successful day: had a nice time with my son, got a few things I need, explored an interesting new store, and ended up with plenty in next week’s budget.

🙂

For a good laugh, check out this amazing performance.

Now, we all know what Fox is…but do you think it’s really a newscast? The talking heads don’t look like SNL performers. Is it a joke, or is it Third-World-style journalism: can’t afford a real film clip or a trip to the zoo for the camera crew, so let’s punt?

Six-thirty in the morning and it’s already 90 degrees outside. Gotta go rescue plants. Later!