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Yesterday intrepid shopper VickyC led the wayon a half-day safari through Ikea. What an experience! The place, which occupies a large chunk of a large retail campus full of warehouse-size furniture stores perched on the banks of a gigantic freeway running through a vastsuburban plain of look-alike tract houses, was just jammed. So crowded was it that you couldn’t even stand still without having someone bump into you. At least a third of the patrons were youngish mothers with small, shrilly screaming children.

LOL! If I had been a child, I would have shrieked, too.

VickyC was continuing her search for a small desk, and she also hoped to pick up some shelves that hang niftily on the wall without visible braces. We did locate the shelves. But a difficulty promptly arose: she lives in a historic house, none of whose measurements are standard in 2008. So neither of the two sizes the shelves come in would fit either of the spaces where she wants to hang them. That she plans to put books on them and one sign announced their maximum load is 11 pounds didn’t help matters.

If she could find a desk small enough to leave room on the 60-inch wall that will house this proposed work space, she might manage to fit in a narrow cabinet of shelves. We looked at every cabinet, every bookshelf, and every desk in the entire 40 million square feet under Ikea’s roof. We searched at such length that by the time neither of us could stand up any longer, the crowds had gone home and we had most of the store to ourselves. During the hours-long expedition, we found one arrangement that mightwork. She decided to think about it.

We came away with three purchases: VickyC found a plastic drawer organizer and I grabbed a few unscented pillar candles and a glass mug to replace the yard-sale purchase I dropped some weeks ago.

I was struck by how chintzy the furniture items were. Much of this stuff is truly ugly: lots of plastic, ersatz veneer-over-cardboard, and fake chrome- or fake nickel-plated hardware.

On the other hand, beggars can’t be choosers: the stuff is amazingly cheap. And it must be said that the children’s furniture includes some adorable and snazzy designs. The “Mammut” series offers this cheerful table and chairs, which come in fire-engine red, brilliant blue, and lime green — to die for. The table is all of forty bucks, and each chair is fifteen.

We were impressed, too, by the large selection of Marimekko-knockoff fabrics, some of them in upholstery weights, others sheer, and all bright, striking, and fun. Next to the fabric department, Ikea sells hardware that will let you convert lengths of cloth into sliding shade-like “drapes” that move back and forth like shoji screensacross a window, an appealing device, indeed. Among the deskoids, we found an exceptionally stylish affair cobbled together with your choice of several etched-glass tops slung over legs fashioned to look like black-enameled sawhorses. With no drawers or other storage, it was useful mostly for decoration, but it did look cool.

Most of our fellow shoppers were twentyish-to-thirtyish adults who had the harried look of working parents. When I was that age, my husband and I had bought a house whose $350 mortgage payment stretched our income to the max. We had zero dollars with which to furnish the place. We had some pieces of Levitz furniture that we’d bought with the bribe my father gave my husband to elope with me, so that he (father) didn’t have to pay for a wedding and reception. And that was it. I ended up building bookshelves and tables with bricks and boards, which furnished our home for some years.

Probably today I’d buy Ikea products instead. The stuff is cheaper than bricks and boards, and at least it resembles furniture, more or less. Doesn’t look like you’d get years of wear out of it…but that may be just as well. You wouldn’t want to keep it around for years. There’s something to be said for stylish junk that can be thrown away when you can afford to buy something better. I’m not crazy about the concept of throwing out junk and replacing it with new junk every three or four years, but if you can’t afford anything better, that’s pretty much what you have to do. That, or live with lots of bricks and boards.

The estate sale has a lot to recommend it…

Wow! What a storm! I’m writing this on my laptop, since it’s not connected to a power outlet. Internet connection is down. Half the TV and radio stations are off the air: Channels 15, 12, 10, and 8, as far as I can tell, plus NPR and most of the stations on the lower end of the FM band.

Not much rain, but the fiercest wind I’ve ever seen swept through here a half-hour ago. It really ripped—I was worried that the devil-pod tree would break and fall on the house. The prevailing direction was out of the south, though, which likely would have blown a major limb northerly of the house with minimal damage. The scary part was the noise: it sounded like a fleet of jet airplanes revving their engines, and it went on and on, for a good half-hour like that. No hail, not even enough rain to flood the back patio: just high winds, lightning, and weird noise.

I can’t get online and there’s no news on the couple of broadcast TV and radio stations that are still live. The power has come back on (and gone off; and come on again) and the wind has died down, leaving an eerie stillness now that the neighbors have shut off the chorus of berserk burglar alarms. As far as I can see with a flashlight, the roof looks OK, though it’s awfully dark out there and I can’t tell much. None of the trees in my yard seems to have snapped, a small miracle considering how overgrown they all are. Cassie the Corgi was visibly frightened but she’s calm now; apparently her terrors pass as quickly as an Arizona monsoon.

In any event, we have two three-gallon containers of water, 40 gallons in the water heater, the better part of a canister of propane, two good flashlights, a store of candles, and two butane lighters. So I guess we’re OK for the nonce and then some, except that I have only a quarter tank of gas in the car. Wuz waiting till tomorrow to refill, by way of staying on budget this week for a change.

This area isn’t prone to natural disaster. Even so, it’s a good idea to be prepared: extended power outages are not unheard-of. Some areas lose power for hours or even days as a result of storm damage, not a good thing when temperatures are over 100 degrees all day. A monsoon normally will drop the air temperature 20 degrees or so, leaving us with a tolerable night. But come 8:00 in the morning…yipe! At the very least, what’s needed is water, candles, flashlights, propane, and a propane grill or camp stove. Modern gas stoves are kept alight by electricity, and so when the power is out your gas range is out too; at best, it’s unsafe.

And clearly…LOL! It would be wise not to let one’s gas tank run dry.

Hmmmm… We appear to be back online. So, to post and then to bed.

Sunday while I was wrestling with the indexing project,PBS mumbled away, background noise that I wasn’t listening to. My attention was snared, though, by a personal finance program identifying itself with Kiplinger’s, whose guests were going on about ways to finance one’s retirement. In the course of conversation, they reminded me of something I’d heard before: if you start taking Social Security early, there’s a way to engineer your way into the higher payment bracket you’d have qualified for if you’d delayed collecting Social Security payments. You can repay the entire amount the government has doled out through Social Security, and that will allow you to start over.

This provision in the Social Security code allows a person who retires early, changes her mind, and goes back work to stop collecting Social Security, remit the funds she collected, and then later restart payments at the amount she would have had if she had not tried to take early retirement.

One of Social Security’s several catches is that if you retire before the so-called “full retirement age,” the government giveth and government taketh away. For every buck you earn above a certain very low threshold, they take back 50 cents, meaning that if you dare to earn a living wage, you get $0.00 from your “entitlement.” This policy ends when you reach “full retirement age” — for me, that’s age 66 1/2 — and after that you get to keep your Social Security, though you have to pay income tax on it. So, if you quit your job and start collecting Social Security at age 62, then go back to work at age 64, your payments are “disappeared” as long as you’re earning more than about $14,000 a year.

Second catch is that the amount of your Social Security payments depends on the age when you start collecting: the younger you are, the less you get. If I had retired at the age of 62, for example, my payments would have been $857 a month. According to the latest statement, retiring right now would give me an income of $1,019. If I wait three and a half years before collect, my monthly Social Security income would be $1,394. But if I can hold off retiring until I’m 70, my payments will be $2,094. These figures are based on actuarial statistics that estimate how long Americans in a given age range will live. The government plans to pay out a specific amount to each participant; assuming you live out your full life expectancy, you would get about the same total distribution no matter when you started collecting.

You can recover from the error of continuing to work after early retirement by canceling the SS payments and returning the money you were already paid. Then when you reach the next age plateau (or when you decide to quit working in earnest), you start collecting at a higher rate.

The speakers on the PBS program pointed out that because only earned income counts against the amount you’re allowed to keep when you start collecting early, if you have enough to live on from dividend income, pensions, and annuities, taking Social Security at the earliest possible moment can be made to amount to an interest-free loan from the government, one that you can use to generate extra income. Here’s the strategy:

1. Retire from your job and start taking your Social Security payments.
2. Pay the required income taxes on the Social Security gross.
3. Immediately place the net Social Security in a fairly low-risk interest-bearing instrument.
4. Collect until you reach the next highest age plateau.
5. Repay the government the amount it has doled out to you. Note that no interest is charged on this amount!
6. Collect the tax refund that the government will now return to you. When you repay Social Security funds to the government, the taxes you paid on them are refunded!
7. Reapply for Social Security and collect a significantly larger monthly payment.

Effectively what you’re doing is funding an investment with an interest-free loan from the government. If for some reason you decide not to go through with the plan, you still end up with a nice kitty in the bank.

Let’s suppose I actually do manage to cling to my job for another seven years. That would allow me to collect “full retirement age” Social Security for 3 1/2 years. By the time I turn 70, I will have collected $1,394 x 12 x 3.5 = $58,548. The tax rules for Social Security income are, like all tax rules, stupefyingly complex, but from what I can tell they do not amount to the rate for ordinary income because some part of the Social Security income may be exempted. Presumably, then, I would pay something less than 28%. Let’s say it’s around 20%: $58,548 – 20% = $46,838 net income over three and one-half years. At a 6% return, interest income on that would be roughly $2,810 of free money.

When I reach 70, I return the Social Security lucre to the government. The Treasury Department refunds $11,710 to me, leaving me with a total of $14,520 to go back into my retirement savings (at 4%, that yields a munificent $580 a year, just slightly better than a hit on the head). But now I collect $2,094 a month: $700 a month more than I was paid when payments were based on my starting age of 66 1/2.

Seven hundred bucks a month is worth the effort. If I haven’t already done so, I quit my job now. My earned income drops significantly, and so taxes on the Social Security drop commensurately. I end up with a Social Security drawdown that makes a real contribution to my living expenses, something $857 would not do and $1,019 would barely do.

So, here’s the Poor Woman’s Answer to the Fat Cat’s Social Security Investment Strategy:

1. Hang on to my job for all I’m worth.
2. Start collecting Social Security at age 66 1/2, but do not quit working then.
3. Bank every after-tax penny of Social Security income in an instrument that returns at least some interest income.
4. At age 70, quit my job and repay the government the amount of Social Security paid to me.
5. Reapply for Social Security, giving myself a $700 a month raise plus a “bonus” of 3.5 years’ worth of tax refunds.

What if I don’t make it to age 70? What if I throw over the traces before then, or if the university lets me go?

In that case, because I’ve banked every net penny of the $1,394 the government started paying me at age 66 1/2, my retirement savings have grown considerably. If nothing else, I’ve accrued a nice emergency fund, or at least enough to kick off retirement with a vacation in the south of France.

If I die before the age of 70, I’ve contrived to recover a certain amount of my contributions to the Social Security fund, which I can pass down to my heir — something I could not have done had I tried to delay collecting until I quit my job.

However, if I dodge the family disease (and chances are I’d have it by now if I were going to get it), then I may be carrying the “good” genes. My father lived to the age of 84 after a lifetime of heavy smoking and unadulterated scorn for the concept of teetotaling. I don’t smoke and never have. The two women that I most take after lived into their mid-90s…and they were Christian Scientists. With decent medical care, I could live at least to age 95 and possibly to 100. Since that kind of longevity poses the risk that I could outlive my savings, yes. Yes, it is worth the trouble. An extra $700 a month could mean the difference between cat food and canned salmon.

Assuming any salmon are still swimming in the ocean by the time I reach that age.

If you live in a part of the country where you can enjoy hummingbirds, you may have noticed that ants love sugar water even more than hummers do. The little gals quickly learn the source of any drips from your feeder; parade up the wall, across the rafters, and down the hanger; and then drown in suicidal droves, contaminating the food and repelling the birds.

Here’s an easy, cheap way to keep ants out of hummingbird food. The one thing you’ll need that may or may not be immediately at hand is a plastic lid of the sort that comes on cans of spray paint: it has an inner ring of plastic that creates a kind of “moat” inside the lid. If you don’t have a can of spray paint around the house, ask your friends, relatives, and neighbors — someone who will let you mooch the lid is bound to have one.

You need:
spray paint can’s lid
piece of cardboard
sturdy tape, such as duct tape or packing tape
scissors
ice pick or large nail
hammer or tack hammer
vegetable oil
hummingbird feeder with stiff wire or rod hanger extender

In the past, I’ve taken a pair of wire cutters to metal coat hangers to make hanger extenders for my hummer feeders. A couple of years ago, though, I discovered that nurseries and Home Depot have rods with hooks on each end that work nicely to hang bird feeders from a rafter. Either will work — the hanger just needs to be stiff enough to support the gadget you’re about to make.

Take the ice pick or nail and gently tap a hole in the center of the lid, using a small hammer. With the scissors, cut out a piece of cardboard about the size of the lid — you can trace the lid, for a neater look, or simply cut out a three-inch-square piece. Punch a hole in the center of this, too.

Now push the metal hanger rod through the cardboard and through the hole in the lid, so that the lid sits atop the cardboard with the open side facing upward. Position it near the top of the rod, and tape it firmly in place, so that it will stay as level as you can make it. Finally, pour a small amount of vegetable oil in the outer “moat” of the lid. Fill the moat about 1/4 to 1/2 full. Attach the rod to the hook in your rafter and then hang the feeder from the lower hook.

Ants hate oil. They will not go through it. Even after it has dried up and congealed, they still won’t get into it! This gadget absolutely positively keeps ants out of hummingbird water, without harming them, you, or the birds.

Hummingbird photo copyright Mdf, from Wikipedia Commons