Dog Days of Summer

Now before this goes any further, let’s get to the important stuff: A bright star just rose in the otherwise hot and muggy summer.

Jacob over at My Personal Finance Journey has announced the final results of his first Tour de Personal Finance blog competition. And who should the winner be but (who else??) our own favorite PF scribbler, Donna Freedman! She won with her eloquent post, “This Isn’t Your Grandparents’ Recession.”

Argh! I remember when she first put that piece online. It’s one of those things that makes you go damn! why can’t i write like that?

A close runner-up was Paula’s thoughtful and smart piece from Afford Anything, explaining how and why she would go into debt if she had a million bucks. I’m not going to recapitulate everything on Jacob’s competition post—be sure to go there and check out all the winners for yourself!

Dog days, indeed: last night it was 95 degrees outdoors at 9:00 p.m. The pavement would still have burned Cassie’s feet and the air would have dessicated both of us, had we dared to go for a doggie walk. So the dog and the human spent another day and another night flaked out on the tile floors with the air conditioning blowing on us.

Do not even ask what the power bill will look like this month. Try not to think about it.

This evening after work M’hijito is going to make the trek to Mesa to pick up the new pup! The little guy is tentatively named Prince. Or maybe King. The breeder had planned to add the name “Prince” to his fancy pedigree moniker but apparently that name was already claimed, so now he’s going to be a King. M’hijito says he’s a prince now and soon will be a king. 😀

Anyway, he invited me to come along to help him transport the little dauphin back to Phoenix. So that will be a joyous moment.

We bought a big wire crate at Walmart, and shortly thereafter one of M’hijito’s friends volunteered to lend him a similar one, at least until the friend needs it again. So we’ll need to take our purchase back this weekend and retrieve our 80 buckolas. While there, we must remember to latch onto a few packages of those plastic plugs you put into electric outlets. Young dogs are fond of kissing electric outlets, the outcome of which is not good.

At my house, I also have a crate, which M’hijito disassembled, scrubbed thoroughly, and now needs to reassemble. Pup (Prince? King? Louis XIV?) will have to go in there while I’m at class, which mercifully is only a couple of hours a day. Next week I’ll be home by 11:30 or noon, but since he won’t get here until around 9:00, the wait to get out will short. And it gets even shorter the following week: the 101s finish their five-week tour of duty next Thursday, and so after they’re gone, I’ll have only the 102s, who meet at 7:00 a.m. Their class is out at 8:50, so I’ll be home by 9:00 or 9:30, leaving Pup in his crate no more than about a half-hour. Two more weeks of that, and then fall semester begins, with classes that start at 11:30 a.m. and meet only three days a week.

Thursday the 11th, however, I’ll be gone a bit longer. I have to toss the surviving 102s out the door by about 8:15 and then fly downtown. Beeeeecause… Phoenix College is offering a new online certificate program in “Medical Transcription.” You can get through it in a year, and voilà! Now you’re magically certified to earn something between $12 and $30 an hour typing dictation from doctors.

Apparently, in the Phoenix area pay is halfway decent (which, in these parts, comes under the heading of pretty darned good). I’ll bet that with a Ph.D. and 20 years of editorial experience, I can come in at least at the median and maybe better than that.

Median pay for a medical transcriptionist working half-time is $2,000 more than I can earn teaching the maximum number of courses allowed for community college adjuncts. And whaddaya bet a glorified secretary for doctors doesn’t fill hour after hour after freaking hour of her time with unpaid labor in the form of “course prep”?

Two thoughts on this:

First, it could be the answer to the conundrum of what on earth I’m going to do when I’m too old to dodder into a classroom and too old to hold my own against a pack of restive 19-year-olds or when I simply can NOT stomach reading another inane student paper ever again. This work can be done remotely. As long as I can still wriggle my fingers, I can transcribe digital content. And I’m good at that kind of thing—I type as fast as most people can speak.

Second, this type of work, while low-paid compared to what Tina and I can command as technical editors or project managers, could be a convenient addition to The Copyeditor’s Desk’s repertoire. If we can pick up some work doing medical transcription at a hospital or big medical center and then let it be known what we really are, it could open the door to medical editing work. And that’s just the sort of thing we do best.

Thus on two fronts I can see this certificate program as worth the cost, whatever the cost may be. I think the S-corp can afford to pay my tuition, but I’ll have to check with the accountant to see if it’s OK for the corporation to foot the bill for its slave’s voc-ed training.

On other fronts, a notice came in the mail that as a member of a broad class I’m eligible for a $7.50 settlement in a class action suit against New Horizon, late the holder of a small HELOC I paid off and canceled some time ago. Well. $7.50 (less the cost of the stamp, less the cost of the envelope) is better than nothing, I guess. It’ll buy a cup of café Americano at Starbucks, anyway.

Exactly what the cause was, I can’t discern well. Apparently it had something to do with the way New Horizon told customers the due date for payments was later than the actual date by which payments had to be posted to avoid finance charges. I never borrowed much on it—it served as a line of credit. When I was thinking about using it to finance the improvements M’hijito and I made on the downtown house, I called to confirm that the impression I’d been given, to the effect that the variable interest rate was capped at around 8.3 percent. Wrong! The not-very-friendly customer disservice rep I reached informed me that it could go as high as 21 percent!!!!!

Holy mackerel. Think of 21 percent interest on the $30,000 we needed…. What a rip! I canceled the line of credit and took out a second from the credit union, which I paid off from the proceeds of the noonlighting jobs I took up when it became apparent the university was about to shut down my office and can us all.

I don’t think I pulled that 8.3 percent figure out of the air; indeed, I distinctly remember asking the broker, with whom I’d done business before, how high the interest on that HELOC could go. So IMHO a certain amount of misrepresentation was going on there. But it must be admitted, I did not take off my glasses and hold each and every one of the eight or ten pages crammed with 8-point type up to my nose and read it. So: my bad.

La Bethulia left for California this morning, whereat La Maya already is encamped.

Naturally, one of La Bethulia’s brand-new tires picked up a nail yesterday afternoon, so she had the privilege of spending an hour or two after work at Discount getting that fixed. I ran over to the eyeglasses place, which closed at 6:00 p.m., to pick up La Maya’s new pair of prescription shades, which she will need on the beach, and La Bethulia came by on her way home to snag those.

Remains to be seen whether they ever get to the beach. La Maya left for the Imperial Valley a week or ten days ago, on news that her mother is dying. The entire family has been gathered around the bedside for all this time. The old gal rallied, after a fashion, but now she can’t walk at all. She’s stopped eating and drinking, and they expect her to pass any time. They’ve called in hospice, which is a mercy, and now they’re all just waiting.

La Bethulia and La Maya had, long ago, arranged their vacation in San Diego.  So La B went over to set up shop in the condo they’re renting, and La Maya probably will join her there. Maybe. It’s only about an hour and a half from Brawley, where the Maya family homestead stands, and so she figures that if things stabilize, she’ll be able to spend at least a little time in San Diego.

Pool guy just called! He’s on his way over right now, craving to get done with work early so he can head off for his own vacation at Huntington Beach. So…he will lighten my load by about $150 to $200. Let’s hope it’s not more than that, which it certainly could be.

The beach. Gosh. Think of that. I will never see a beach again. Too bad: I love the ocean, having grown up next to one. Oh well. Keep saying it: that’s a want, not a need.

Sooo cranky in the heat and the humidity and the short, short nights of sleep. Each day seems full of don’t-wannas: don’t wanna grade papers, don’t wanna be at work at 7:00 a.m., don’t wanna stand in front of classes four & a half hours straight, don’t wanna wrestle with the pool, don’t wanna do the yard work, don’t wanna clean house, don’t wanna drive around the city in the heat, don’t wanna  listen to Cassie yap, don’t wanna diet, don’t wanna spend any more money on expensive little “emergencies,” don’t wanna don’t wanna don’t wanna be in Phoenix in the summertime…

Spent a good 90 minutes or two hours as dawn cracked this morning, hacking away at the cat’s claw vines that have made good progress in their campaign to consume the pool equipment. They’d recovered, with a vengeance, from my last attack on them, earlier this spring when the Leslie’s guy came round to clean out the filter for the summer season. What a job!

Well, this will be convenient: I’m running low on food and had planned to race out to a grocery store this morning. Since the guy was scheduled to show up between noon and 5:00 p.m., that would have given me about two hours to do the several hours of running that awaits, and so I figured I wouldn’t be able to get all the stuff I really need. Now I should be able to pick up food and gear and finish grading most of the stoont papers today.

And so…to quit procrastinating.