The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Hey! Gather Little by Little reports Adam at Your Money Relationship has taken the initiative to revive the much-missed Carnival of Money Stories! GLBL Guy will host the inaugural edition on May 11.
Hooray! I’ve always loved this carnival and missed it when it fell into disuse. Adam is looking for hosts, so if you have a bit of time to volunteer, go on over here to sign up. And send your submissions to the carnival here. Let’s try to keep this fun idea rolling.
♥ Thanks, Adam!!! ♥
OMG! Have you seen Mary’s Carmelized Banana Tarts over at Simply Forties? To die for!
Mary’s spectacular performance reminds me that I’ve promised, off and on, to put up my mother’s recipe for pecan pie, the one that used to dissolve my father. I think she got it from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Cross Creek Cookery, which came out in 1942. It it were me, I’d add some bourbon.
You need:
4 eggs
1 1/4 cups cane syrup
1 1/2 cups broken pecan meats
1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 raw pie shell (store-bought or home-made)
Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees.
Boil the sugar and syrup together two or three minutes. Beat the eggs not too stiff; then pour the hot syrup into them slowly, stirring. Add the butter, vanilla, and pecans. Turn into a raw pie shell and bake in a moderate oven about 45 minutes, until well set.
What a lovely quiet day here at the Funny Farm, as far away from the Great Desert University as one can get. Cassie and I hung out for an hour or so at the park, one of the nicest neighborhood parks in the city. I’ll try to remember to take the camera tomorrow.
Weekday mornings and afternoons, with the kids in school and most of the grown-ups at work, the park is almost empty, except for a few SAHMs playing with their toddlers on the climbing array and the swings. When the weather’s nice (which is most of the time), it’s a perfect bumhood retreat. I’ll need to get a new day pack (the old one wore out a couple years ago and, in the absence of hiking and camping, got tossed) so as to carry some drawing and painting gear over there, and maybe some fine iced tea.
Gardening
From there it was off to Baker’s Nursery to pick up some flats of dichondra. Last time I was there, two or three weekends ago, they had flats of woolly thyme, which I craved to plant between the flagstones off the back patio. Those were gone, so I had to settle for dichondra, though I did find a few small pots of woolly thyme among the herbs, plus some delicate Corsican mint, a couple of low-growing perennials, and two sprigs of hugely invasive and practically unkillable myrtle. The flags, which until recently hosted a little dichondra and a lot of flowering burr clover, were invaded this winter by a noxious little weed that turned into a wiry, ugly mat and killed off the more pleasant weeds.
Beer Ice Cream
Before turning to the twin projects of digging up the rest of the weeds and planting the new stuff, I tossed together a nice lunch of spaghetti with walnuts, fresh tomato, and basil. At this point I discovered that placing a cold beer into the new deep freezer for as long as it takes to boil a pot of spaghetti and then pouring it into a frozen mug results in a delectable, ice-cold slushy. Very nice!
And so to luncheon on the back patio, where gazing at the new crop of Meyer lemons forming on the tree out back led to a rumination on…
Flat Lemon Juice
Yes. I finally had to pick the last of this spring’s bumper crop of huge lemons, larger than the oranges—some were as big as small grapefruits. Squeezing them produced large quantities of lemon juice.
At first I started freezing the stuff in muffin tins, a quarter-cup per container. These chunks will be handy for cooking. Just now I have two large freezer bags full of them.
Then SDXB remarked that pouring the juice, a cup at a time, into small ziplock bags and laying them flat to freeze is a much handier way to store the stuff. It freezes into a thin, flat layer. To use a teaspoonful or a tablespoonful, all you have to do is open the bag and break off a small amount. This way you don’t have to defrost more than you need. Tried this. It works.
So now I have another couple bags of lemon juice in this format. Shouldn’t have to buy any lemons before the next crop comes ripe!
Cultiver Notre Jardin
The iris came up prettily this spring. The new ones sport an interesting color combination of gold and violet. They didn’t last long—a single 100-degree day fried them.
However, the short blast of summer heat tricked the Easter lily cactus into thinking it was time to bloom, and so it produced its own brief display of startling color.
So it goes.
Consider the Lilies of the Field
They toil not, neither do they spin. This first day of peremptorily claimed vacation offers a tantalizing view of what life will be like in unemployment. Think of it:
Day after day of hanging out at the park, walking or bicycling the canal, schmoozing with friends, visiting nurseries (and botanical gardens and museums and free midday concerts , tending to one’s garden, puttering in the kitchen.
How can I count the ways that I can’t wait?
🙂
Well, it took a load of chutzpah to turn around and tell Her Deanship that her and her deanly pals’ decision to shut down our office and can all five of us is all wet. As in…i can’t buhlieve i did that!
Apparently she’s so stunned she can’t speak: nary a reply has come back since yesterday’s memo was dropped into the Wells of Silence. Not even the usual two-word “thanks, vh.” One colleague points out that she probably has other things to think about. My paranoia, however, suggests she’s thinking how to say “forget that!” LOL!
Ultimately I recruited a half-dozen full and associate professors—two of them very husky full bulls, indeed—to sign onto our memo. We argued that shutting down the office, which is unique to North America and, as far as we know, to the entire planet, would be penny-wise and pound-foolish, since its creation entailed a huge investment of talent, administrative diplomacy, cash, time, and effort and it will never be resuscitated if it’s allowed to die now.
Her Deanship, as we know, was one of the administrators who was responsible for bringing our operation into being, and she has told at least three of our colleagues that she regards it as her baby and regrets having to close it. So there’s an outside chance that her silence comes about while she argues with her co-deans and the rather scary vice presidents that they should accept our proposal, or some variant thereof.
Even if our scheme works, it won’t make a lot of difference for me, financially. The real point here is to save our unit, which has a great deal of potential that should not be wasted. Personally, the main advantage would be that it would allow me to delay collecting Social Security for another 18 months, upping my gross income by a grandiose $304 a month. On a nine-month basis, my salary would drop to about what it was when I was teaching, well below the state’s median income.
Instead of prorating that piddling salary over twelve months, as I used to do, the plan now is to be paid over nine months and then use savings to cover the two summers between December and the time I reach full retirement age. Combining regular monthly savings, the extra amounts that have accrued in my various savings and and checking accounts, and the amount I’ll net teaching three community college classes in the fall, I’ll have about $21,000 above and beyond the $23,000 saved last year to pay off the second mortgage on my house. My house will then be free and clear (again), and my living expenses should drop to around $1,840 a month. Figuring I’ll probably need around $6,000 per summer, there’s enough to cover two summers with one and a half left over!
The scheme’s biggest advantage for me is that it would allow me to delay major drawdowns from my retirement savings for a couple of years, by which time my investments may have had a chance to recover a little. This would be good, obviously. But it’s not imperative: my financial advisor has shown that I can live comfortably enough, even on the present remains of my savings. And obviously, I won’t recover the losses of the past six months in just two years.
Much of the angst brought on by this forced early retirement has been resolved by the discovery of a nifty workaround to get past the $14,100 limit on earned income for those who take “early” Social Security. I’ll tell you about this tomorrow.
Well, Funny made it over to BlueHost but still has some going to arrive intact. Watch this space! 🙂
Well, tomorrow’s the day of the big switch. Mrs. Micah is going to help me convert Funny to a monetized site (anyone wanna buy an ad, BTW?), switching to Bluehost in the bargain. I have no idea how this is going to work, and of course given my advanced level of technobumbling, the site may go down for a while. But not because I’ve forgotten you! One way or the other, Funny will be back.
It will be interesting to see if this li’l blog can make any money. I’d be surprised, frankly. But really, even a couple hundred bucks a month would help! Every $2,400 it makes is one section of freshman comp I don’t have to teach! The delightful Poisoned Pen Press gives me about a novel a month to proof, to the tune of two or three hundred dollah. So it looks like the class load could be 3 and 2 or even as few as 2 and 2.
Ugh. Teaching freshman comp until I can’t hold a pen any longer was not quite what I had in mind for old age! Ohhh well. Could be worse: could be lighting a campfire under the Seventh Avenue Overpass.
The other day when a cool evening was coming on (temps have been all over the thermometer the past couple of weeks) I saw a woman who looked to be about my age, her shopping cart parked as she tried to scavenge under some trees for firewood. Poor old gal. Makes freshman comp look mighty fine.
Sorta…