Uncategorized

A walloping wind storm blew up this morning, just as my friend and I were heading out for our morning walk. What a sirocco it was! We saw a patio umbrella fly through the air over a neighbor’s roof, like Mary Poppins’s brolly without the Mary. And on my way home, who should I meet but a fire hydrant wearing a bright red hat! A nice one, too, and in practically brand-new condition. I rescued the lost chapeau and brought it home. If no one puts up a “lost” flyer, it’s mine. Believe I’ll give it a purple hat band.

Meanwhile, various things are going on in other parts of the world:

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly finds a secret millionaire living next door.

Five-Cent Nickel starts a conversation on the qualities (or not) of CFLs.

Mrs. Micah opens an envelope and finds a dunning letter from a collection agency-nothing actually due, but the hassle leads her to describe what you should do if you find a collection letter in your mailbox.

Paid Twice has a mellow reflection on the psychology of budgeting.

In the reflection department, Plonkee has posted several lately. Today’s has to do with why one likes one’s job.

SVB at The Digerati Life launches a discussion of why long-term investing beats short-term trading.

Over at the Simple Dollar, Trent is expecting a zillion-dollar tax rebate…well, make that $1,800. And he aint’ buyin’ a TV with it.

At Queercents, Paula has an interesting post on what networking is really all about.

Come to think of it, I’d better get off the Internet and make a reservation for the next book publishers’ association meeting. ‘Bye!

My car gets about 18 miles a gallon. Coincidentally, my office at the Great Desert University is just about 18 miles from my house. So when gasoline sells at $3.50 a gallon, it costs me $7 a day to drive back and forth to work, or about $140 a month. That’s from the git-go: before driving to the nearest decent grocery store (about eight miles round-trip), to the Costco (about 10 miles round-trip), to the nearest Home Depot (about 16 miles round trip). Unless I’m careful, the monthly gas bill could easily add up to $200…quite a jump over an $80 tab just a few months ago.

Here are a few strategies I’ve come up with to try to keep a grip:

*Carry as little weight as possible. I’d already removed two of the four back seats from the van, to accommodate two large dogs. Since I never carry more than one human passenger, I took another seat out, leaving lots more room in the cargo compartment and lightening the car’s load by about 50 pounds. Allegedly, lightening up can improve your gas mileage by 1% to 2% per 100 pounds; so the absence of that extra seat should make things .5% to 1% better.

Drive slower on the freeways. To avoid confrontations with aggressive drivers, I watch for slow-moving traffic and then queue up behind it. The impatient folks jerking around me and my fellow tortoises pay an extra 18 cents to $1.16 a gallon for their bullying habits. Meanwhile, I save 40 cents a gallon by driving 60 mph instead of 70 mph.

Drive with overdrive on. It not only saves wear and tear on the engine at higher speeds, it also saves gas.

*Turn off the engine whenever a wait is more than a few seconds, such as at Costco’s gas lines, at a drive-through, or at an endless train crossing. Avoiding idling can save as much as 19%.

Keep the engine in good working order and keep the tires inflated to the recommended pressure. Although Edmunds’s tests found tire inflation made little or no difference in gas mileage, driving on low tires causes unnecessary wear on the tires and may be less safe.

*Build careful shopping lists and buy only at stores that are on the way to and from work. This lets out Home Depot, which has no outlets on any of my routes. However, there’s an Ace right on the way, in the same strip shopping center as a grocery store. Buying hardware and home maintenance items there allows me to buy necessities without having to rack up any extra gas mileage. Ditto picking up the groceries on the way home, instead of waiting till the weekend to go shopping. Safeway, Basha’s, two AJ’s markets, and two Costco stores are directly on my way.

Telecommute as much as possible. Working at home one day a week saves 20% on the cost of driving to campus: $7 a week or $28 a month.

*Use a day of vacation time now and again to engineer three- and four-day weekends, cutting another commute whenever possible.

Always use American Express’s 3-2-1 card for gasoline purchases. When regular unleaded is selling for $3.50, the 3% kickback on gas is the equivalent of 10 cents a gallon.

That’s about it. I can’t bicycle: too far, too dangerous, too hot. Can’t use cruise control: the freeways are so crowded they never move at a constant speed. Won’t ride the bus: turns a 30-minute drive into two hours and ten minutes of wasted time.

Are you doing anything special to save on gasoline? What is it?

It’s four in the morning. The dog’s heavy breathing woke me an hour ago and puts sleep out of the question. Well…the steam-engine effect plus worrying about where the money to pay the vet will come from put sleep out of the question.

I’ve now spent almost $500 on the dog so far this month. The billing cycle closes on the 20th; today is only the 9th: plenty of time to rack up more costs against the amount available to spend—which also has to cover food, gas, and all other necessities.

In spite of four Benadryls, the dog can barely breathe through her nose. At this point she gets ten pills a day and four doses of eyedrops. She’s now developing the cracked, scaly skin around her nose said to be a symptom of lupus, another wildly expensive chronic disease. In saner moments, I think I should put her down. But in fact most of the time she seems pretty lively: she eats well, she plays with her toys, and although she can no longer run after the toys, she still wants them thrown and she still retrieves forever, albeit at a walk instead of a run. She’s as alert as a 13-year-old dog gets. Is a stuffy nose a capital offense? Or running the human into bankruptcy?

The thing that’s frosting my cookies here is that after two weeks of dosing her with antibiotics and smearing a veterinary ear ointment on her nether parts-a procedure that puts me at risk of having my hand removed at the ankle—she still stank until I broke out a tube of Myconazole 7, which brought an end to the problem in two days flat. Same as it brings an end to similar problems in a human female. In other words, $10 worth of an over-the-counter antifungal did what $500 worth of veterinary care did not do.

Since it’s not possible to get the stuff up inside the dog (not and live to tell about it, anyway), it may be that two rounds of $50 antibiotics were necessary. But as far as I can tell, they did little or nothing to clear up the infection. What worked was the grocery-store ointment. It would have helped a great deal if the vet had suggested this first, rather than clipping me for drugs that I can’t afford and that don’t seem to have done much.

That makes me reluctant to drag her back in over the nasal congestion. I suspect that every time I take the dog to the vet, the vet takes me to the cleaners.

But she’s doing the same thing Walt did at the end of his life: sticking to me like she was glued on. She won’t let me out of her sight-she follows me if I get up to go to the bathroom. The “Velcro dog” effect, IMHO, is not a good sign. Dogs, being social animals, want to hang out with other pack members, but it’s not their nature to be on top of each other all the time. When this happens, it means the dog is uncomfortable or in pain and is seeking reassurance. So, there’s probably more at work here than simple old age.

Sigh.

Today the Great Desert University will confer degrees on an astonishing EIGHT THOUSAND students, enough men and women to populate a small town. GDU is a learning factory and most of these degrees rolled off the assembly line, one of the few remaining products stamped Made in America.

Even so, many of our finest faculty were not. Made in America, that is. Nor were quite a few of our students.

Many of today’s graduating seniors, master’s degree holders, and Ph.D.’s are first-generation college students, often children of immigrants-especially those who attend the westside campus, which serves a large working-class population. With just a slightly stronger recruitment effort and some credible support from the throne, the West campus could be a Hispanic-serving institution, a status that opens doors for grants, scholarships, internship, and employment opportunities for all its students. But Hispanics make up only one contributor to the cosmopolitan nature of the enormity that is the four combined campuses: walk across the main campus and you will hear languages from all around the globe.

It’s an exciting polyglot campus whose intellectual and cultural diversity build sophistication for every student who attends classes there. That’s quite a remarkable thing, considering that just a decade or two ago, the place was something of a backwater.

For a first-generation college student, graduation marks a truly huge milestone, not only for the individual but for her or his family. These young (and sometimes not-so-young) people, many of whom have worked their way through school, have achieved a tremendous accomplishment, often against tall odds.

When you’re in the trenches, it’s easy to generalize from evidence of plagiarism and near-illiteracy that all U.S. college students are desperately wanting in every way and to conclude that the next generation is racing to Hell on a skateboard. That’s because the worst episodes and the most recalcitrant students take center stage in your consciousness. The ones who don’t give you trouble tend to fade into the background. But in contrast to the plagiarized paper and the incompetent efforts turned in this semester, I also saw one paper whose quality was on the professional level-a proposal that a charitable foundation support a program for blind children-and in fact, its authors intend to present it to the foundation’s board. Two or three other papers were excellent, and the rest were adequate.

No doubt among those 8,000 new graduates, the proportion of the competent and the truly excellent is the same as it is in any upper-division course.

There’s still hope for America.

1 Comment left at iWeb site

Mrs. Micah

Yay, a hopeful post. 🙂 Sometimes the people who come to the library really get me down about the country. But many are reading and plenty are quite fun, so it’s not as bad as all that.

Thursday, May 8, 2008 – 11:36 AM

Dunno about you, but I loathe seeing wads of computer cords, lamp cords, and telephone cords laying around the floor. Besides making a ugly-looking mess, they get in the way of Roomba-she chokes on them-and they’re a nuisance when I’m vacuuming with a more serious machine.

You can buy various gadgets to bundle cordage together. But in the first place I’m too lazy and cheap to track the things down and order them, and in the second, people who use them tell me they’re nuisances in their own way.

There’s an easier way, involving hardware you’re likely to have around the house: cup hooks. Got some heavy-duty stick-on Velcro around the house? That’ll work, too.

For a desk with an “apron” around it, get a few cuphooks. Climb under the desk, bringing your handy-dandy electric drill with you. Drill small guide holes, not very deep, about every six or eight inches along the inside of the “apron” or, if your desk top is thick enough, on the bottom side of the tabletop. Screw in the cup hooks, using the guide holes as starters. Then untangle the cords, bundle them neatly, and tuck them into the cup hooks, so that they are held up off the floor and prevented from wadding themselves together.

Here’s how that works:

These are computer and printer cables, phone lines, and a lamp cord running under my desk.

And here’s how the desk looks to a viewer in the room:

With the chair in place, the power strips are barely visible. Some of the other cords extend to the right and plug directly into a wall outlet, which is completely out of view. It would be even less cord-cluttered if I would bestir myself to get AirPort. But that might be work. And it certainly would cost me something. Horrors!

A table in the family room has a lamp that has to be plugged in way across the room. Check this out:

The view from above. Before I secured it under the tabletop, the lamp cord dropped off the table on the right side and ran across the floor under the chair-messy and a hazardous nuisance.

For cords sitting on a table whose backside always will be turned to a wall (that is, it’s not the kind of furniture designed so that someday you might place it in a room where it can be seen from all sides), cut a strip of Velcro three or four inches long. It should be long enough to go over the cords with plenty to spare on either side. Stick one side of the Velcro to the back of the table. Place the cord where you want it, and then place the other side of the Velcro over it, pressing firmly to secure the strips of Velcro together. Do not remove the plastic backing on the top piece of Velcro.

Well…you get the general idea. My PC has had it with uploading graphics and refuses to import these either in Flash or by web browser, & I am tired, having copied & pasted wayyyy tooooo many old posts from accursed iWeb into WordPress. If you want to use Velcro, do the obvious: Stick a strip of glue-on Velcro to the back of a piece of furniture. Press the cords into place and stick the other half of the Velcro, with its gooey backing protected by the plastic backing, over the cords. This will hold the wires where you want them.

This morning as I drove past my old house, I spotted some people moving in! Stopping to say hello, I met a friend of the new owners who was helping the young family to move and was wrestling with the watering system, which (welcome to our neighborhood!) had sprung a leak. He asked if I knew how to get into the system’s control box–someone had shut it and lost the key. Well, Richard the Landscaper Extraordinaire had installed the same make of system over here, so I had an extra little plastic widget, which I lent to them.

I have yet to learn whether it helped, but in the meantime got to see a bunch of my old neighbors, who I miss a lot. It’s good to be further away from the war zone at the corner of Nineteenth and Dunlap and almost out of reach of the unholy construction that’s already started on Nineteenth, but friendly neighbors are worth a lot.

The young family moving in has three kids. The house has four bedrooms, so I suppose it’s doable…but unless two kids bunk together, it means Mom and Dad have no private space other than their bedroom, which in these houses is not large. But then, when we were growing up nobody ever heard of home offices and “den” was a word that meant “family room.” They have all three kids in the mid-town Catholic school, so that’s good, since the public school that serves this neighborhood is notorious as a “problem school.” People move here, put their kids in that school, and forthwith their house goes right back on the market. So if the kids stay at St. Francis, maybe the family will stay in our neighborhood. ?

It’s a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. To the extent that interesting stuff is going on, it’s happening on the Web. Check out J.D.’s startling post at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity asking what the heck you’d do it if was your mom and your sister who stole your identity and racked up 17 grand of debt in your name.

Five-Cent Nickel explains what is meant by “mutual fund correlations” and points to a tool that reveals correlations among Vanguard funds. The Micahs have figured out how to spend their tax rebate: Mr. M. needs a new computer.

Across the Pond, Plonkee has a very interesting post on “the credit card shuffle,” a maneuver calculated to leave you with the smallest interest on your largest debt and the largest interest on your smallest debt. This allows you to follow the Dave Ramsey version of snowballing, wherein you work on the smallest debt (regardless of interest) first to charge yourself up psychologically, but to get rid of the stiffest interest rate first.

At Wisebread, Jabulani Leffal offers up ten ways to go on a date for $20 or less, plus some lively prose.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity pokes a hole in the myth that a 15-year mortgage necessarily saves you more than a 30-year mortgage.

RacerX is back after a short hiatus. Glad to see he’s returned.

SVB offers ten practical tips for new entrepreneurs at The Digerati Life.

Be This Way highlights the brilliance of a Florida state elected representative. We have geniuses like that here in Arizona, too. Just now ours have set aside their prudery in favor of displaying their bigotry.

Trent at The Simple has another one of those posts that make me feel glad I’m past child-bearing age, this one about the infuriating ubiquity of commercials in school curricula. If I had a kid today, you couldn’t get me to put her or him in the public schools, and probably not even in private schools. It’s beginning to look to me like if you can’t afford to have one parent knock off work and home-school a child, you can’t afford a child.

Well, Granma is tiring out, so it’s time to roll up the sidewalk and dodder off to bed. Hope all you young pups are having a wild and wonderful Saturday