Coffee heat rising

Soo…How’s the Snake Oil Workin’?

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So, we’re a week into the Great CBD experiment, in which we massage a snake oil concocted from marijuana into selected specimens of the myriad lentigos (“sunspots,” “age spots”) that infest my hide. The research question: Does this stuff really fade age spots and help heal actinic keratoses, as its enthusiasts claim?

So far? The jury is decidedly still out.

The Map of Australia, which decorates the finger-flicking digit on my left paw, appears to be slightly lighter. Or…that could be wishful thinking.

The Great Blot on the face: hmmmm….might be a tiny bit lighter, but probably not.

This one already has a lighter area in the center; a week ago, when this image was made, it was uniformly brown across its diameter.

Two large spots on the left leg both seem to have changed for the better, but in a strange way: they’ve lightened to normal skin color in the center, but a brown halo remains around this “normal” patch, in both cases. Other spots on that leg don’t seem to have changed noticeably.

The ominously two-toned blot on the right shin seems possibly slightly lighter, and the dark brown patch within it is blending with the remaining area: little by little, but by now noticeably. Another large spot on that leg is developing a light-colored center, like the ones on the left shin.

One set of relatively small spots on the left forearm has faded significantly. A larger spot nearby: I can’t see much difference.

Others, I would say, seem fundamentally unchanged.

LOL! We have a month to go in Phase 1 of our moment of science. This should be entertaining.

If it doesn’t work, then what???, given that you can’t persuade dermatologists to freeze them off, the way you used to be able to do? Interestingly, Amazon carries hydroquinone creams galore — they’re all 2%, but you could simply apply them more often to get more on the things. You can buy retinoid cream there, too, also at 2%. So I’m going to give the CBD a month. If it hasn’t started to make a noticeable difference, compared to the photos I made, then I’m going to order up one of these others.

Meanwhile, the dermatologist recommended Elta’s 50 SPF zinc sun-blocking cream, which, interestingly, she peddles out of her office. Seeking to buy it for fewer dollars, I ordered a tube of that from Amazon: a bargain at a mere $24.50 plus 10% tax, for a supposed three ounces.

Rip-off, IMHO. The tube that arrived was about 2/3 full, making it appear in the photos that you would be getting a lot more. And of course, as we know, an SPF of 50 gives you about 1% more protection than SPF 30, so there’s really no point in paying more for a higher number.

Over at Fry’s — Arizona’s answer to Kroger — what should I come across but a much larger — and fuller — tube of Neutrogena zinc-based SPF 50 sun screen….which goes from Amazon for all of $8.99. This, I put in my car so that I can smear it on my hands — which are in water so much that nothing I put on in the morning is going to stay put for long — every time I get behind the steering wheel. I must say, the Neutrogena is far superior to the Elta, in terms of use. The Elta is so greasy as to be oily. The Neutrogena, though it’s a little thick and asks for some rubbing to spread it on smoothly, is nongreasy — has about the character of an ordinary skin moisturizer.

Both of them, being zinc products, spread a white film over your skin. Don’t panic! You can rub most of that in, plus if you just leave it alone for awhile, the whitiness of it will melt and fade. Put the stuff on, go on about your business for awhile, then put your makeup on, and no one will be the wiser.

Men: I dunno if I’d apply this stuff directly after shaving, especially if you use a razor blade for the purpose. It might be OK right after using an electric shaver, but try it on a small patch first, before slapping it on like aftershave. It could be that either way, if you shave first, then putter around with feeding the dog, grabbing some breakfast, and getting dressed, it will feel OK having given the hide half-hour’s after-shave rest.

Dog(walk) Days of Summer

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Summer is tentatively turning its golden-locked head toward fall. Nights are growing longer, days shorter, and the other day’s violent storm knocked the temps down a few degrees. As I scribble, it’s only 98 out here on the side deck, just fine for breakfast, coffee, and computerized time-wasting.

You think I jest? Yes, it is “only” 98, by comparison balmy with recent days whose mornings have started out at 102. It’s a little drier than it was the other day, too: Wunderground pegs the humidity at a mere 38%, as nothing compared to yesterday’s 64%.

Cassie-off-leash
The endless doggy walk…

Ruby-Doo and I got a late start on the morning’s trek — didn’t leave the house till 6 a.m. But to my surprise, we hardly ran into any other dog walkers: only three dogs in a good two-mile perambulation. Which is like…the Twilight Zone, where you wake up one day and discover you’re the only person in the whole town.

What explains this Great Absence? I figure it’s Labor Day: this is the last big three-day weekend of the summer, and anyone who has the means flees the city for one last fling in the cool(er) high country. If you can take off Friday — which lots of people can — you wangle a four-day weekend. And if you work for a government office? Well!

At Arizona Highways — which is run by the Arizona Department of Transportation, making everyone there a state employee — we used to store up our vacation days so they would straddle a three-day weekend. So, for example, my boss would take four days off right after Labor Day, giving himself a week, and two weekends away from the office: (saturday.sunday.monday.tuesday.wednesday.thursday.friday.saturday.sunday) nine days off for the price of four vacation days.

Ultimately, this was remunerative, because the State of Arizona was required to pay you for unused vacation time when you retired. There was a (very generous) limit to the number of days you were allowed to stash for this purpose, but you can be sure that by the end of any given fiscal year my boss was always maxed in that department. 🙂

Didn’t do me much good, because my husband was in private practice and was expected to…oh, you know…show up to work? That kind of unreasonable demand. However, I still got enough vacation days to take off on the junkets he liked to indulge himself in: Hawaii and waypoints.

At any rate, whatever the reason, it was mighty quiet out there between 6 and 7 this a.m.

Susan-B.-Anthony-DollarIn the lengthening shadows of (financial) winter department, I discussed the current budgetary horror show with WonderAccountant. She pointed out that because I never owe any taxes and I get a large refund every year, it’s unnecessary for me to have the feds withhold income tax from Social Security. Cancel that! said she.

Well. Easier said than done.

After some fiddling around on the Internet, though, I finally found a form online. ONE LINE in an entire page of bureaucratic fill-in-the-blanks allows for a “Do not withhold” request. Checking the box and signing at the bottom requires fiddling around with downloading and then printing the form: duly done. then the page suggests you can either mail the form to a Social Security office or drive to an office near you and submit it in person.

So I figured I’d drive up to the SS office in Paradise Valley today and drop this thing off.

But on second thought: There’s no “dropping off” at that place. Dollars to donuts, I can’t just hand this thing across the counter to someone. I would surely end up having to take a seat and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. Depending on the time of day, wait times range from 45 minutes to three hours.

To turn in ONE FUCKING LINE??????????

Barf.

Now the plan is to drive this over to the post office, stand in line there (almost as interminably, but surely not for one to three hours), and send it Return Receipt Requested. What a nuisance!

Well. The $300 a month that SS is now extracting from my paycheck will re-fund the empty Emergency Savings account, thereby taking up some of the slack.

That will still leave an $8870 shortfall, per annum.

But, noted WonderAccountant, now that we’ve converted The Copyeditor’s Desk from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship (and paid last year’s taxes!), I can take money out of that without tax consequences.

This year.

But then what?

It looks like the choices are…

  • To get a paying job. (Right! Know anyone in the market for a 74-year-old female employee? Har har!)
  • To cut every expense possible. (Done. Now what?)
  • To hustle up at least net $10,000 worth of business in the coming few months.

Ten grand is an awful lot of amateur novels and Chinese scientific treatises.

Truth to tell, the amateur novelists are paying one helluva lot more than the Chinese scientists. This is because a budding author’s draft magnum opus typically runs upwards of 30,000 words. At 4 cents a word, that’s $1,200. Or more. Usually more. The last two authors who hired me paid over $3,000 apiece. But even at only $1,200, that’s…what?  Three amateur novels would yield $3600, leaving a mere $6,400 in the shortfall. This would require about 20 Chinese scholarly articles to cover.

And that ain’t a-gonna happen. It might be workable if I could extract $3,000+ from every wannabe novelist. That is the going rate – 4 cents a word – if you look it up on the Net and you believe what other editors publish on their websites.  To make enough to generate at least 10 grand a year, then, I’d need to land three or four budding Herman Melvilles. Or Isaac Asimovs…most of them dream of writing science fiction.

The only way I could make that happen would be to really hustle the editing bidness. This would mean showing up at every local club of wannabe writers in the Valley — and showing up regularly. And handing out professionally written and laid-out marketing junk at every meeting. It has to be said that the last two novels I picked up came from members of the West Valley writer’s group.

That outfit meets in Tolleson, almost an hour’s jaunt from my house. It’s a horrible drive, and then you have to sit through three hours of palaver. The members are very nice and a delight to socialize with. But because nothing very useful — for my purposes — is said, it feels like an aching waste of my time. Especially if I have paying work in-house.

If I’m having to go to four or five such groups’ meetings, we could be talking about 12 to 15 hours a month of achingly boring time suck…plus drive time. I cringe! Surely there must be a better way??????

 

 

Any Bum in a Port…

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Or is that any port for a bum?

Lordie! Started the morning out with one of the ‘Hood’s signature Happenings.

Ruby and I headed out for the daily doggy-walk right at 5:30. We step forth through the side gate and lo! Out from the driveway of the house across the street comes this very shady-looking character. He has exactly zero business there, unless he had managed to get under the roof over their front-door entryway to get out of last night’s melodramatic storm. He has a backpack.

He sees me and says something to me — whatever he said was unintelligible at my distance from him — and then proceeds south on Tiny Lane, headed toward East-West Feeder Street. I don’t see the neighbors out there but can see a light on in their house. Our guy is wandering — not marching along but sniffing into one yard or another, roaming in a circle across the street, just…meandering.

It rained like Hell last night, first storm we’ve had up here all year long. Lightning like God wanted to disintegrate someone’s house. Thunder enough to raise the termites right out of the ground. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to spend that night in the rough. But he didn’t appear to be wet. Either he was able to keep some clothes dry inside his backpack, or he got into someone’s carport to stay out of the worst of the driving rain. Probably the latter: right around the corner, there’s a house with a large carport that, now that the owners have been shuffled off to an old-folkerie, stands empty. Great bum hotel! 😀

This guy has an invisible sign on his back reading BURGLAR SERVICES, CALL 1-800-999-1234. So, having once again forgotten to bring my cell, I turn around, grab a phone from indoors, and call 911. Go back outside to watch the guy’s progress.

While I’m talking to the dispatcher on the phone, the old gal comes outside. I ask if she’s OK, and she says they’re fine…she had no inkling that this guy was lurking in their yard. She says surely if he’d come very close to the door the dog would have barked. Well, they do have a dog, but he’s no yapper. He actually woofs quietly once or twice while we’re chatting and moving around the driveway, but he makes no fuss over my being on his property.

Their front entryway, thank goodness, has an iron gate across it, and it’s locked. I figure the guy was probably peering in their windows and maybe looking for a way to get in, but had decided to move along right about when Ruby and I came out our door.

Dispatcher gets off the phone. Neighbor goes back in her house. Ruby and I go on our way.

Two miles of doggywalking and a good 45 minutes later, we’re just coming up Tiny Lane headed back to the house, and lo! a police SUV cruises by. Floats around the corner and parks in front of the Funny Farm. We hurry to catch up with them.

They want to hear all about it, and apologize for the length of time it took to respond: their station is way to hell and gone off on the northeast side! Forgodsake, no wonder the cops never get here during the same lifetime when you call them.

(This, BTW, is why you’re taking our pistols and our German shepherds out of our cold, dead hands…)

I repeat everything I told the dispatcher to the two officers. They’re very nice. Shortly, they head over to the neighbors’ to ask them if they’re OK. They said they’d perform a “wellness check” and be sure none of the windows or doors had been tampered with.

Guy was probably harmless. Most of the homeless mentally ill drug addicts around here are harmless. But you never know. They’re sometimes very high on some very dangerous drugs. They might be fine when their voices are quiet and they’re sober, but…yeah. You never know with these guys. And this one was not acting even faintly straight.

Humid? Hot? Holeeeeee sheee-ut! It was a little cooler, at 5:30 this morning, than it has been. But the air was soggy. One of the humans owned by Sammy the Pound Puppy said the humidity was 64%. That sounds about right.

Normally, monsoon starts along about the end of July or the first part of August. But we haven’t had any rain all summer. This is the first noticeable storm in our parts — “our parts” being in the rain shadow of what Sonoran desert dwellers think of as (heh!) a mountain. If you’re a normal human, you’d call it a “hill”…but whatever it is, the thing is big enough to block most of the rainfall that threatens the ‘Hood’s  microclimate.

It’s a chilly 102° right now, along about noon.  There’s a slight chance of rain in the forecast for this afternoon, but those of us who know how to read an Arizona sky would say “not so much…” Saturday night we have about a 39% chance of rain, so they say, and Sunday night a much more promising 61%. Next week, predictions suggest more normal monsoon action, with a pretty fair chance of precip every evening through September 7.

 

Rain!

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At last! Monsoon season is almost over, and here we get our first thunderstorm of the summer — with rain. About time, I’d say!

Ruby the Corgi is unnnerved. She contemplates jumping off the bed, but it’s a drop from the top of the mattress to the floor. Too exposed up here: she craves her den, under the toilet.

Clearly, under the toilet is the only safe place to be during a noisy storm. 🙂

And noisy it is. The light show is going on about 5 to 10 miles away, by my count. But still, a few thunderclaps are…arresting.

Amused myself this evening by starting to figure out next year’s budget, the annual required minimum withdrawal having just arrived from Fidelity. The numbers do not look good.

It appears that over the next year, I’ll have a shortfall of $12,470. This year’s RMD plus Social Security total up to $31,460, but when I set aside the amounts I paid for 2019 taxes and insurance plus the $300/month for emergency savings, the net available to live on for a year is $20,085. Meanwhile, my total average living expense per year is now $32,556, not including any little surprises like dental work and pool repair. That’s a shortfall of $12,471. If I don’t put anything aside for emergencies, we still end up with a shortfall of $8870.

I got by for about 10 or 11 months this year on the RMD and Social Security, but had to take the RMD a couple of months early. Financial Dude just transferred $16,500 from Fidelity, but after taxes & insurance, that will not cover my costs for 12 months. Or even, I’m afraid, for 10 months.

Coincidentally, we’re de-incorporating The Copyeditor’s Desk, changing it from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship. What that will mean tax-wise escapes me. But the business account has just about enough to make up the shortfall, assuming I don’t have to buy any new computer hardware. But…that’s this year.

Then what?

 

Oil and Water: The Miracle Cure?

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Okay, so here’s my latest quack nostrum: a glass of water.

I’m sitting here the other evening contemplating how bad the hide looks. The arms are not just freckled with potentially precarcinomish sunspots, but the skin is sagging and crepe-papery and realllly ugleee. So…what else? I go online and google how you can treat sagging wrinkly old-person skin.

What comes up, right off the bat, is the suggestion — repeated at various sites and debunked at others — that wrinkling can be caused by dehydration. That’s not of the “smear hand cream on your hide” variety but of the “drink water” variety.

Hmmmm… Whether guzzling water plumps up your wrinkles and erases years from your aged arms or whether it does…well, nothing, the fact struck me that I hardly ever drink water anymore.

What do I drink?

  • About three cups (24 ounces) of coffee every day.
  • A glass or two of iced tea
  • A glass or two of wine, or a bottle or two of beer, or a bourbon & water

Annnddd…that’s about it.

Caffeine is dehydrating, so if there’s any truth to the tale that you need ample water for good skin health, then the coffee and the iced tea might be described as counterproductive. So, one might expect, would alcohol, in whatever form you choose to imbibe.

Sooo…what is considered “enough” water? For a woman, it’s ELEVEN CUPS a day. For a man: 15 cups (of the eight-ounce measuring-cup variety).

Well, of course that’s insane. Eleven cups is almost three quarts; 15 cups is almost a gallon.

On a lark, though, I decided I’d try drinking that much (water, I mean…) just to see what happens. So measured out 11 cups into a clear glass water pitcher and stashed it in the fridge, planning to pour a glassful every few hours. This would allow me to see how much water I’ve consumed at any given time of day and sorta keep “on schedule,” trying to get through half of it by mid-day and the rest by around 8 p.m.

Soooo…. I tried it. The strategy, such as it is, added about three quarts of water to the usual ration of about 3 cups of French press coffee and one or two glasses of wine or beer per day.

And…holy mackerel! What a difference! First off, along about 9 p.m. the first day, it occurred to me that I felt better than normal. Second, on inspection, even on the first evening, the hide looked noticeably better. And third, that night I did not wake up at three in the morning.

Well, okay, the latter may be coincidence. But the decrepit hide issue? It’s getting better every day. Where the skin on my arms was kinda hanging loose in the inimitable manner of Old Age, it’s firmed up and is not sagging or looking pathologically wrinkled near as bad.

Do I look like I’m 23? Hell, no…but neither do I look like I’m pushing 93. The skin looks a lot healthier, firmer, and…almost normal. I mean, normal for, say, a 45-year-old.

A glass of tap water: cheapest med you can buy, eh?

As I may have mentioned a while back, a friend showed up at the Funny Farm bearing a small vial of CBD cream. CBD is a now-legal (amazingly, in crazy-conservative Arizona) derivative of the marijuana plant; commercially, it comes in the form of an oil, a cream, or a waxy salve. The spot where the latest actinic keratosis had been frozen off the back of my left hand still hurt, even though it was ostensibly healed. So, without thinking about it, I slapped a dab of this stuff on it.

Then thought…uh oh! That was dumb!

And then thought…holy mackerel!!!! This WORKED.

Yes. Within minutes the stuff had killed the pain that was radiating across the back of my hand.

Soooo… I started to look it up and found that yeah, CBD oil can apparently ease minor, superficial skin pain and possibly even joint pain (not likely, because it isn’t absorbed through your skin…but whatEVER).

This was interesting. I continued to use it.

Come last week’s appointment, I present myself at the westside dermatologist’s office, where I’m greeted with ecstatic exclamations of amazement at how well the damn thing has healed up. I think…right, sure. This performance rings of “humor the patient,” but I go on about my business figuring that the nothing too drastic has been going on. Of course, I do not clue the doctor to the fact that I’ve been smearing cannabis oil on my sweaty little paw.

But…suppose this stuff really does work to promote skin healing? Suppose it aids in healing of actinic keratoses, in specific?

What the hell else can it do?

Could it, do you suppose, help to fade the age spots that speckle my hide like a leopard’s fur?

Clearly it’s a quack nostrum. Evidence that it works to fade solar lentigines (the techno-name for sun spots) is anecdotal and vague.

But…but on the other hand, it doesn’t appear that the stuff is likely to hurt you. It’s poorly absorbed through the skin, and so has few or no systemic effects, as far as I could unearth. And I don’t appear, idiosyncratically, to be allergic to it: no sign of a rash on the hand where I applied it so liberally.

Well. For the past three weeks, I’ve been smearing this stuff across the back of my left hand and on a particularly annoying age spot that adorns its finger-flicking finger…and…hmmmmm…. The left hand is the one that gets most of the blast of the sun coming in through the car’s window when you’re driving (surprise! glass doesn’t block enough UV light to matter, after all!). So it has lots of age “freckles” on it, as well as that spot, which looks like a map of Australia.

And y’know what? The thing is getting lighter. The smaller spots have faded, too: still there, but compared to the right hand, lighter and less noticeable.

But I could be dreaming this up, of course. Nothing like a little wishful thinking to make your age spots fade…right before your eyes. 😀

So I came up with a wee experiment:

Selected several particularly prominent lentigines — this is easy, because having grown up and lived in the subtropics all my life, I have them all over my body — and photographed them.

Next, I’m going to rub a CBD skin product into each of these sun spots, several times a day over the next three or four weeks. Then, photograph them again and see if any noticeable change appears.

This should be amusing… In the “doesn’t have enough to do with her time” department. 😀

Batten Down the Hatches! Prepare for the next recession NOW

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So Mr. Trump, our mentally ill President, just crashed the economy with one of his acts of lunacy. The Dow is down over 600 points, and that was after showing some signs of instability in the past couple of weeks.

Like it or not, China is a major trading partner for the US. Shut it off, and we cut off our own nose to spite our proverbial face. Trump’s act of spite will harm every business in this country, large or small. Mine, for example, the smallest of the small: Trump just closed my business. China has always been pretty woozy about sending money beyond its borders, so when you’re selling a service to clients on the mainland, getting paid can be a challenge. When I decided to quit using PayPal and found that Bank of America couldn’t figure out how to accept a wire transfer to a business that has an apostrophe in its name(!!), that left only Western Union as a way to transfer payments owed. This was questionable enough as it stood, but now that the Moron in Chief has cut off trade with China, it presumably will be impossible.

Presumably, indeed, I will never be paid for the two difficult academic articles I just finished editing and preparing for publication. And presumably after this The Copyeditor’s Desk will get no (zero, zip) further business from its bread-and-butter clients in China.

That is about as micro- a micro-example of this fiasco as you can get.

On a far more macro level, there’s a reason the market lost over 600 points before it closed. This country does a lot of business with China. Cut it off, and you close a lot of businesses, end a lot of commerce, lose a lot of jobs.

And lose a whole lot of income for the American middle class.

Mark my words: The Trump recession will make the Bush recession look like a walk in the park. If you have any illusions that you can survive it, now is the time to prepare yourself and your affairs. How?

  • First, pay off debt. Pay all your outstanding credit cards right now. If you owe a lot on a mortgage, it may be wise to sell your house while it’s still worth something and rent someplace until such time as this recession comes and goes. If you have a car loan, pay it off if you can, or get rid of the car if you can.
  • Do not take on any new debt. Do not buy a car. Do not buy a new house or apartment. Do not go off on some expensive vacation or indulge yourself with anything that requires you to charge up more than you can pay off at the end of a billing cycle.
  • To the extent possible, place investment funds in money market, CD, or other relatively “safe” instruments. These will not make money for you, but they won’t lose much, either. Get out of securities.
  • Charge nothing on a credit card that you cannot pay at the end of the billing cycle out of your bank account. Pay off credit cards at the end of each month or, if that is a challenge for you, simply stop charging on credit cards. If you can’t pay for something with cash, don’t buy it.

If you’re a retiree with most of your life savings in an IRA, 401(k) or 403(c), the timing of this latest moment of lunacy could hardly be worse. Along about now, retirees with deferred investment instruments have to make their annual “required minimum withdrawal”: a forced withdrawal of a percentage of savings, so that you will have to pay taxes on it. With the market extremely depressed, two things happen:

A drawdown generated by the required percentage will be substantially less than normal (think of it this way: 10% of $100 is $10. But if one day your $100 loses $60 (say 1 stock market point = $1), then you get 10% of $40. That would be $4. Which ain’t a-gunna be enough to live on. And of course the remaining $40 will not rebound to $100 or even to $96 very soon, because it will be short 10% of the funds you would, over time, reinvest to recover the value of your losses.

There aren’t a lot of ways to prepare for a little catastrophe like that. One way or the other, you’re not going to have enough to get by. But you’ll be a lot less likely to have your house foreclosed out from under you and your car towed off to the impound yard if you don’t owe anything on them.

I have to say, for the first time in my adult life, I’ve begun to think seriously about decamping to some other country. Permanently.

Apparently one of the best places you can go to live as an expat is Panama. A little town called Boquette, to be precise. Check out the real estate in this place! How about the view from this hovel, 3520 square feet in a gated community, for about $100,000 less than I could get for my house today…

Crime levels are low in Boquette. The local expats say there’s lots to do and the weather is great. Medical care, we’re told, is more than adequate and is reasonably priced.

Two of my friends have already moved to Mexico. They’re both ecstatically happy. One is a native speaker of Iberian Spanish…but Spanish is easy to pick up if you don’t already have it. Especially if, as happens to be my case, you speak two other Romance languages and have a spattering of Latin.

Lookit this thing: it’s easily a hundred grand less than I could get for my house here, and it’s freaking gorgeous. Much, much nicer than my house, and 1478 square feet larger.

The time may be a-comin…