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M’hijito called early this afternoon to ask if I’d like to drive with him to the far side of the galaxy, for the purpose of visiting Ikea. The real, ulterior motive was to get my car, not me, to go with him: I have a van; he drives a rickety, out-of-production Toyota sportsoid car.

Couldn’t have called at a better moment. About forty-five minutes earlier, I had somehow managed to hit exactly the right mystery keyboard command to screw up six hours’ worth of work on the Carnival of Personal Finance. 

To start with, as usual the thing is about the size of the Andromeda galaxy. Then I got this bright idea about all these photos that oooooohhhh yes, I just had to download and plug into the post. Each of these dorked up spacing here and there, which had to be fixed by trial and error, because in WordPress WYSINQWYG (What You See Is Not Quite What You Get). After hours of lovingly fiddling around, I sat back and sighed: a true work of art! It was gorgeous. It was beautiful. It was freaking perfect!

Then…damndamndamn!…my fingers slipped on the keyboard. I have no idea what set of keys I hit, but it was at least four of them. The image on the monitor jumped, jiggled, did a little belly-dance…and settled into something that looked kinda strange.

Whatever th’heck I did, it 

• deleted every hard and soft return after every single unwrapped line;
• deleted the last image I’d entered, which I’d placed three from the end;
• undid the reformatting I’d done to the three images following the now-disappeared image;
• returned the red coloring on the little Editor’s Favorites heart symbols to black;
• undid the formatting I’d carefully instilled to force several entries to wrap around other images without looking stupid; AND…
• saved the result! 

Gaaaaaahhh!!!!!

Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z

And Hal: stop calling me “Dave”!

Well, no amount of Ctrl-Zing would restore the disappeared formatting and data. So I had to do all that over…it took about two hours.

If it had crashed the file after performing its reformatting antics, that would have been fine—I had saved just seconds before. Resuscitation from an unsaved version would have been a lot easier. Thought I wuz gunna die!

So all this made a junket to a crowded, crazy-making box store full of cut-rate merchandise sound good. 

M’hijito has been needing a bed, some bookshelves for his office, and a little table for beside the bed for lo! these past two or three years. He finally gave up on saving up enough to buy the Danish furniture he craves—on sale, it was over $3,000. That’s more than he wants to spend, under the best of conditions, when a) he wants to go to graduate school and b) he needs to preserve savings to maintain the albatross of a house his mother got him into. So, despite having resolved never to allow another stick of Ikea furniture into his home, he caved.

He did pretty well, IMHO: For $500, he scored a decent-looking platform bed, a matching side table, a seven-foot bookcase, a child’s low-to-the-ground table to hold the gigantic printer his father gave him, a colander, some CFLs, a couple of rugs, and a few other small kitchen items. 

So that brightened the day. The Carnival is now ready to go up tomorrow morning…it won’t, of course, because WP thinks 03:06 May 31, when it’s really 19:06. So I’ll have to fiddle with it whenever I get out of bed on June 1, if I live that long. Having been up since 3:00 a.m. and having worked or trudged around Ikea every single minute since then, I intend to drug myself with antihistamines by way of trying to sleep until dawn.

Which reminds me: I forgot the laundry in the dryer and I haven’t washed the sheets yet. And so…to work.

Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money 

This week’s CoPF is up at Greener Pastures. More about that in the next Moments of Fame, scheduled later this week. Meanwhile, though, in addition to visiting Greener’s excellent round-up, which has a great Memorial Day theme, remember that Funny hosts the Carnival of Personal Finance next week!

Yayyy! Be sure to send in your contributions to the Carnival’s website. Looking forward to seeing everybody’s posts.

Spring has done all the sproinging it’s going to do around here, and now temperatures are in the low 100s every day. The pool is decidedly warm enough to swim in, though most of the yard’s flowers are fried. I need to pull out the remains of the winter garden, which has gone to seed, and decide what to put in there for the summer.

A few hardy characters are thriving, though. I was delighted to find the emerald green paloverde has burst into bloom, weeks behind all its coreligionists. Paloverde trees drape themselves in vibrant yellow flowers in late spring. Most have already come and gone, and, because in past years the one in my yard hasn’t blossomed much, I figured that because the thing is a hybrid it likely will never flower. Wrong!

The ground beneath this amazing shade-maker is carpeted with golden flowers, and the canopy hums with small solitary bees and big, bumbling black carpenter bees. The Sonoran desert is the richest habitat for bees in the world, they being nourished by insane trees like this.

Creatures alien to the desert are coming out in the early summer heat, too. A pot in back has sheltered three bulbs donated to my cause by SDXB. They’ve sat there for years, soaking up water and giving nothing but long strappy leaves in return. A couple of weeks ago, though, suddenly one of them sprouted a huge, club-like stalk:

Yesterday the stalk produced this:

It’s VAST, a good six inches across. Not only that, but there are two more of them on the same stalk! It looks like a strangely colored amaryllis. 

The usual suspects are around, especially the roses. In the summer heat, freshly blossomed roses blow in minutes. Nevertheless, I managed to capture this one before it fricasseed :

Gourds love the desert heat, and so do many melons. The butternut squash seeds I took out of a grocery-store purchase have produced three husky plants in their giant pot, and they’re already blossoming. Last time I counted, there were six or eight flowers in there.

The plant wilts in the heat but springs back every evening after the blasting sun goes down. I guess wilting is a survival technique. The cantaloupe, which grows much slower and has yet to produce a flower, doesn’t do that, at least not yet:

Don’t know how well it will do in that pot, which in the first place is probably not large enough for a chunky vine and in the second was cracked at the outset—tying it together with a length of clothesline rope had dubious results.

Then of course we have the usual suspects, bougainvillea that never seem to know when to quit flowering—they’re been at it since February, since the risk of frost disappeared, and all of them will continue to blossom until it gets cold again. I love bougs…

The Easter lily cacti bloomed a little early this year. They’ll be back soon, though: they normally blossom on and off throughout the summer.

Outrageous-looking thing, isn’t it?

Four-thirty in the morning… {sigh} Is it early or is it late? Nothing like sitting in front of a computer to pass the wee hours. I’ve been here since 3:30. Woke up after a weird dream—I was working, under the same annoying soon-to-be-canned conditions, at a much nicer and more professional venue than GDU, someplace that looked a little like Central Arizona Project’s sylvan offices. In this dream I walk out after dark in a rainstorm to go home, only to discover my car has been stolen. So I go back inside the building, followed by a small, very wet chihuahua-like dog that has decided to allow itself to be rescued.

Returning to consciousness, it struck me that my sidekick, who does a large slab of the work our office performs, can’t possibly be letting any grass grow under her feet. 

She’d be a fool to wait to look for work until December, when the office is being shut down. Unlike me, she’s highly employable. If she gets a job anytime in the near future, we are screwed, screwed, ge-screwed. The minute that woman goes out the door, we’ll have to shut down a third to half of our operation.

If we do that, will the deans just close us down altogether? Can they? I do have a contract, and my only surviving RA has a far more convincing contract to the effect that GDU will provide her graduate-student support for the duration of her tenure in the Ph.D. program. It won’t, of course: the history department ended up with nine support lines for twenty-six graduate students. Several people who were in the middle of their programs found themselves suddenly without assistantships.

It remains to be seen whether they’ll dump my RA out in the snow come the end of December. By then there should be some stimulus money, but given the callousness we’ve seen from the deans’ office, if I were her I wouldn’t be expecting to see any of that money.  She’ll be ABD in the fall, her comps coming up in August. If she has to go out and get a fulltime job somewhere, probably answering phones or greeting WalMart shoppers, I can’t imagine how she will finish her dissertation.

Well, thank God for the natural riches of this world, for we certainly have little enough of the manmade variety to go around.

 

With delight I rose to the bait when My Small Homestead posted a link to This Garden Is Illegal’s list of seven DIY weedkillers. What I wouldn’t give to have something cheap and handy to beat back the predator vegetables that infest the yard and gardens, especially during rainy season, when they keep me awake all night chorusing “Feed Me, Seymour”!

Alas, though, I’ve tried all of Illegal’s seven nostrums, and not a one of them does any good. One, boiling water, even stimulates milkweed to grow more vigorously! 

Your choices are to spend several hours once or twice a week on hands and knees digging weeds up by the roots (not very practical when you have a job, or when it’s 115 degrees in the shade) or…yes. I’m afraid so: Roundup! That’s glyphosate to the chemists among us.

Some folks think Roundup is evil, and one guy claims it killed his dog, but a little googling suggests that conclusion may be unlikely. If you believe the science, the stuff degrades on contact with the soil, although there is some evidence it doesn’t all go away. It’s bad for aquatic life and should be kept out of pools, ponds, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Of the commercial herbicides, it’s evidently less toxic than most, although you wouldn’t want to mix it in your evening cocktail. I don’t. But I do use it on weeds. 

Directly on the weeds and only on the weeds. How? By putting it in an old container with one of those drip nipples, of the sort that come on sports water bottles. But don’t use a water bottle for this purpose! Too easy for innocent bystanders to decide to take a sip out of it. Lots of other containers have these things, including old dish detergent bottles and, my favorite, an ancient Spray’n’Wash bottle. Despite a high initial cost, I find it economical to buy Roundup in concentrate form and mix up a small amount as needed. One container of it will last a couple of years. Mark it clearly, so you can’t miss the contents.

Pour the stuff into the applicator bottle and then dribble it carefully onto the leaves, and only the leaves, of the offending weed. Because the nipple lets the herbicide drib out a few drops at a time, you have a lot more control over where it goes than you do with a sprayer, and you’re lots less likely to get any of it on surrounding plants. Roundup is absorbed and metabolized through the plant’s leaves and, over the course of a few days, does the plant in. Little or none of the chemical is left—I leave the weeds to biodegrade or for Gerardo’s guys to carry off in the monthly clean-up. I don’t, of course, put them in the compost.

Because this gives a lot of control in where you’re applying the stuff, you can deal with a problem like the one pictured here, where milkweed has taken hold in the middle of a lantana plant. Spraying Roundup on these things would guarantee a dead lantana. However, because contact with just a few leaves will kill the weed, all I need to do here is bend one of the milkweed’s long stems over away from the ornamental plant, set a rock on it gently (so as not to kill or damage it), and dribble a little Roundup on the part of the weed that’s being held away from the plant. As soon as the Roundup dries, I can remove the rock. In a couple of days, the milkweed will shrivel up and go away.

Organic? Heck, no. Environmentally friendly? Well, marginally at best. Better than any other approaches I’ve found? Yup.

And speaking of my ungreen career as an environmental criminal, ROI sings the praises of low-flow showerheads. {cackle!} Hand me that screwdriver, say I! Dribbles there a more annoying self-important appliance than a low-flow showerhead, other than the damnable low-flow toilet???

How exactly a showerhead that rations water so that you have to stand under it two or three times as long to get clean saves water (and money) over one that actually works escapes me. If the showerhead saves 20 percent on water use, but it takes you five times as long to rinse the shampoo and conditioner out of your hair, it would appear that the dribbley showerhead uses more water, not less.

You can jimmy most low-flow showerheads, an activity that may be illegal in some places but that satisfyingly expels Big Brother from your shower stall. Of course, if you’re in the habit of standing under the hot water until your body turns to spaghetti, this strategy will a) drain the hot water out of the tank a lot faster, cutting short  your trip to nirvana, and b) run up your water bill. But if your main reason for taking a shower is to get clean, you can speed things along significantly by getting rid of the low-flow restrictor.

Newer low-flow toilets work better than the earlier models did, thank God. After I innocently replaced the toilets in my last house, little knowing that Home Depot and Lowe’s no longer carried toilets that worked, I ended up having to flush twice to get rid of urine and three or more times whenever anything more solid was deposited in the bowl. Two or three times a week, the toilet clogged and overflowed. I learned to be very quick at shutting off the water valve (but still sometimes had to clean up the mess off the floor!), and I got pretty good with the plunger, too. 

Finally I had to buy a special model that actually would flush, available through only one manufacturer at a cost of well over $300. Then I had to pay to have a plumber take out the “old” new toilet and replace it with the hugely overpriced gadget I’d been forced to purchase. This left me with two bathrooms and one functional toilet. I made up  my mind that I would never again replace a working toilet for decorative reasons. I even started to watch the alleys for discarded old toilets, planning to grab the first complete, unbroken one I found and stash it for future use. I also planned to take the take the functional model with me when I moved.

And that’s exactly what I would have done, had toilets not been somewhat improved. They’re still not great, but at least they work most of the time. Again: if a plumbing device saves 1/3 on water use (as low-flow toilets are said to do) but you have to operate it three times as much to make it work, how does it save anything?

What a rogue!

Am I alone in the universe? What do you think of as “green” irrationality?

Food! It’s the best medicine for whatever ails you, right? And comfort food, those often nonnutritional, even junky goodies Mom would slip to us when we were enjoying a day of real or imagined misery, that’s the finest penicillin of all. IMHO.

What’s your favorite?

Mine, prosaically enough, is chocolate milkshakes. Yah. Ice cream. Chocolate. Whapped together with a little milk. Curative!

This morning the flu’s fever was gone. But though my temperature was back to normal I still felt like a truck had run over me: head hurt, nose hurt, throat hurt, body hurt, whining volume set to “high”…and more to the point, it was the start of the third day in which I could not even look at food. Decided I’d better eat something, or I was gunna fade away to a shadow. So I schlepped over to the grocery store (sharing my virus with everyone with whom I came in contact, but alas, there’s no one else to run errands here) and bought a gallon of Safeway’s finest generic ice cream and a half-gallon milk and the only Hershey’s syrup left on the shelf (tellingly, they were almost out, suggesting I was not alone in search of comfort). Brought it home, mixed up a bunch of it in the blender, and slurped it all down.

🙂

Ahhh! Cured!

Well, not exactly cured, but it sher made me feel a lot better.

My mother used to soothe me with macaroni and milk: she’d cook some macaroni, heat some milk, mix in the pasta, and add butter, salt, and pepper. Too much work for the adult me, though: when I’m sick, I don’t wanna work at hunting and gathering.

What does the trick to get you out of the poor-me doldrums?

A reader wrote in to ask what happened to a favorite Funny about Money post, “Is Frugality Un-American?” When I searched the blog archives, I couldn’t find it. Thought it must have dropped out during the transition from WordPress.com to Bluehost.com, and so went to the old site’s dashboard…where it still didn’t surface. But I finally found it on Google.

Turns out I’d spelled the title a little strangely, which probably complicated efforts to find it: “Is frugality unAmerican?” It’s still there, and it did come over to the new server. 🙂