The Digerati Life’s proprietor, Silicon Valley Blogger, features a very nice survey of the types of shredders available. Nice timing here: my aged shredder is wearing out & soon will need replacement.
Revanche and PiC are about to buy a Dog Chariot! LOL! I thought I was the only person who bought a vehicle to accommodate the dog.
Financial Samurai has posted a very detailed discussion of when you should and when you shouldn’t hire an accountant to do your tax returns. This is really quite a good post and it elicits some interesting comments from readers.
At My Journey to Millions, Evan and The Wife contemplate a move to bigger quarters, now that the parents wish to visit for the purpose of doting on the new babe. When we said “there’ll be some changes made,” were we psychic or what?
And finally, in the hilarious excess department, check out this outrageous story at The Consumerist. “Floozy”! Who would think anyone under the age of 60 had ever heard the word, much less knows what it means? 😀
Thanks, God, for leading the late, great tax lawyer to shuck me off her rolls and for moving a tax accountant into Dave’s (former) Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. She and her husband not only are splendid neighbors, she saved me a ton of money on this year’s taxes and charged a fraction of what the lawyer’s been billing.
If this doesn’t warm the cockles of Frugal Scholar‘s heart, nothing will.
So I’ve been building a berm around the north side of the biggest orange tree, where the grade slopes enough to draw the irrigation water away from the tree and direct it under the gate and out into the alley. This has been a longstanding annoyance, but I’ve been too lazy to do much about it.
Having dug a couple of deep holes for a pair of new roses, I finally had some nice, clayey, sticky dirt with which to form a low semicircle that I hope will trap the water…without my having to find enough dirt to build an entire circle. That’s the plan. To shore up this mound, I want to cobble its surface with river rock. I do not wish to purchase the river rock.
Luckily, the alleys around here are full of loose rock, quite a lot of it just what I have in mind. So I spent half a morning walking up and down the alleys scavenging stones. As I’m skulking around, what should I find but a big framed giclée print, brand-new, still in its Costco cardboard protectors, just sitting there next to the garbage can.
Why is it in the alley?
Its glass is cracked.
Somebody paid $29.99 for this thing, marked down from $39.99. Think of that.
First, it means one of my neighbors can afford to throw $29.99 directly into the trash. Second, it means they don’t have enough sense or craftsiness to schlep to the nearest glass shop, ask them to cut a piece big enough to replace the broken pane, deconstruct the cheapie frame, and fix it themselves.
Granted, Aaron Brothers or Michael’s will charge more to replace the glass than the junk print is worth. But a glass shop will charge just a few dollars. And taking a picture frame apart is just not very difficult.
The thing is an awful cliché, of course. But I couldn’t leave it to die in the alley. My plan is to replace the glass and then hang it on the back patio, well in under the overhang where it can’t get wet. In time it’ll fade, of course. But for the nonce…hey! Free décor!
Moving on, the rock quarrying endeavor is slowly yielding a nice variety of stones and rip-rap. I found some thick broken slices of unpolished milled granite (??? what do you do with that?), a few pieces of flagstone, and many, many desert stones and river rocks. Here’s the nascent project; it’s much further along now than it was here. I expect another two or three alley expeditions will retrieve enough rocks to cover the entire semicircle.
I hope this works. Sometimes my berming schemes succeed, sometimes not. An awful lot of water pours out of that tree’s bubbler. This mound may not be tall enough to contain it, or it may flow downhill toward the gate fast enough to wash the dirt away, stone paving or no stone paving.
I thank God for the prolific orange trees in the back yard, which despite being battered by hail and hard frost still provide enough vitamin C to kill an army of rhinoviruses.
Too diseased today to write anything original. So let’s entertain ourselves with a cruise through a page of the endlessly entertaining Google News.
Tragedy strikes in Appleville: writing for The Telegraph, British columnist Christopher Williams bemoans the shortage of iPad 2 parts, some of which emanated from Japan. Needless to say, the dwindling supply of Japanese compasses and ultrathin batteries threatens the future of personkind. One commenter on this effete little piece remarked drily, “Until iPads become edible, they are of no real importance in the current circumstances.”
BBC observes that the doctrinaire demagogues in the U.S. House of Representatives have voted to cut funding to National Public Radio. Public media being s-o-o-o-o-o-cialism and good investigative reporting invariably being LIBeral (nevermind that it’s scarcer than fur on a chicken’s egg these days), we should all be grateful for this heroic effort to get rid of all that, so more voting Americans can cast ballots without bothering their sweet heads with things like facts. It might be noted that public broadcasting is not just for the intelligentsia; more than half of Americans access it every month. The Senate has yet to vote on this issue, and so it’s not too late to write to your elected representatives. Go to 170 Million Americans for more information.
If you weren’t already afraid, very afraid, get ready for real terror: America is becoming a Hispanic country! Oh, the horror. Just as it became an Irish country after the potato famine, a Polish country during the waves of Eastern European immigration, a Chinese country while the railroads were being built, a Welsh country while we were importing miners to rip ore out of the earth…heaven help us!
In Japan, a country in no danger of turning Hispanic (yet!), 7,000 people have been confirmed dead, the government has raised the danger level at Fukushima a notch, and Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls the situation “grave.”
That notwithstanding, the Japanese stock market is recovering as the Bank of Japan and G7 countries intervene on the falling yen. Just the other day, Frugal Scholar was worrying about the ethics of taking advantage of investing as markets tumble in response to a disaster. Now’s the time, folks, to buy stock in companies that produce the supplies that will be needed to rebuild Japan.
Citizens of the globe don’t put much stock in their governments’ soothing words about the potential meltdown of not one, not two, not three, but four nuclear reactors. Despite world leaders telling their people don’t worry, be happy, consumers as far away from Japan as Great Britain are racing to buy potassium iodide, a substance said to block the uptake of radioactive iodine. Better buy some stock in the companies that make that stuff, too!
Speaking of the Brits, the Prince of Wales is spending a great deal of energy saving a variety of red squirrel native to Great Britain.
Faced with the threat of invasion by UN forces to “protect civilians,” Libya has declared a cease-fire. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Stem cell research, that bane of the right-threaded wingnut, is now poised to save many right- and left-wing lives. Injecting stem cells into the hearts of cardiac arrest victims can bring scarred heart tissue back to normal. This astonishing development promises to relieve untold suffering and restore health to millions of people.
Now…if only we could come up with a cure for the common cold…
Thank God for Social Security! Without it, I’d be spending my old age in real poverty.
Busted because I spent over $200 yesterday, just sitting here in the house. Disgusted because after KJG left, I came down with a roaring sore throat. And cain’t be trusted to show up at the weekly trade group breakfast meeting because of the roaring sore throat.
{sigh} I hope KJG doesn’t catch this bug. At least I’m not exposing my friends in Scottsdale to it. And thank goodness it’s spring break and I don’t have to entertain 50 freshmen today. Ugh!
Some spring break, eh? It starts out with three solid days wasted doing battle with the unholy Blackboard and ends with a nasty cold.
After I paid Gerardo twice as much as his usual fee for the extra work he and his sidekicks performed by way of cleaning up after the recent hard freeze, he lost the check. His pocket had a hole in it. Actually, all his pockets have holes in them, as we discovered when he resurfaced here asking for another one. So I had to stop payment on the first check. That will cost me fifteen bucks, so, bitch that I am, I wrote him a new check for $15 less than the first one. Maybe that was ungracious. But…I really shouldn’t have paid him double his usual amount to begin with, and to add a hefty bank fee on top of that when I’m trapped in my house because I can’t afford to buy gasoline until next Monday was a bit beyond the pale.*
*Update: This turned into a pricier adventure than I imagined at the time I was writing. The credit union has upped its stop-payment fee from $15 to $32!
Then the locksmith charged $111 to install a new lock and make keys for it. That also was a bit beyond the pale for a job a handyman could’ve done.
Anyway, now there’s a lock on there that can’t be opened by someone who decides to break the windowpane.
The kitchen doors on these houses are the most vulnerable entryways, through which most of the break-ins happen. By and large the residents secure the sliding doors; although those are notoriously flimsy, a few simple tricks will make them harder to break through than most burglars like. But if you have an ordinary lock on the back door, which is the only egress in the event of a fire on the stove, then the burglar can just punch a hole in the window, stick his hand through it, unlock the door, and make himself to home. Because of the safety issue—trapped by a fire, a person could panic and not find a hidden key to a deadbolt—people tend to install single-cylinder deadbolts on those back doors.
During my cleaning frenzy the day before yesterday, I discovered a greasy forehead print on one of the backdoor windowpanes. It wasn’t that long ago that I cleaned those windows, so this must have happened fairly recently. Evidently the perp—or some other wannabe perp—cased the joint.
Don’t think this happened on the night of the event, because the motion-sensitive exterior lights were not on when I walked out to investigate. They stay on for about five or ten minutes, so, unless the guy waited until after they clicked off to try his luck on the side door, it doesn’t seem likely he peered into the kitchen at that time. Besides, what could he have seen at 4:00 in the morning by the light of the microwave clock? It’s very dark out there.
Charming.
As soon as I regain consciousness this morning, I’ll have to burn my last gallon of gasoline on a trip up to Home Depot, there to buy some prison bars for the back door. I just hate those ugly things—dammit! it’s the bad guy who belongs behind bars, not me!—but without a big, mean dog and now lacking the wits and reflexes of a younger woman, I just don’t feel safe anymore.
Well, I see one client sent a new chunk of technomaterial to edit yesterday, and the other called while KJG was here asking if I’d do a rush job, which she dropped in the mail yesterday. Sooo…. I’d better get to work. Sore throat or no, it’s gonna be a busy day!
Image: Human rhinovirus 16-coat protein at high resolution. A. T. Hadfield and M. G. Rossmann. Posted at the Protein Databank, an “archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community.”
Racing around frantically since six o’clock this morning. My friend KJG will surface here around 11:00, for what I hope will be a relaxing day of hanging out. Whenever she gets here, things should slow down.
Meanwhile…
Gerardo the Lawn Dude Supreme left word on m[get up! fly to the kitchen, close the back door to block dust and fumes from Gerardo’s flunky’s blower]y voicemail while I was out last night, saying he wanted to come around to clean up the unholy disaster area that is my yard…like, this morning. Not knowing when he’s likely to show up or if, shortly after dawn blower the leaves off the patio and deck, roll up and stow the hoses. Scrub the dirt off the patio table.
Haul in the feather comforter I left up overnight on the clothesline; put it into the crippled dryer to bang around on air fluff. Fold and put away the cotton blanket left out to dry. Pull down the makeshift clotheslines and stow them. Try to clean the kitchen and fix breakfast and feed the dog at once.
Reach Gerardo on the phone around 7:00. Can you get in here and out before KJG shows up? We want to have a nice lunch outside. No problem!
Race to pull in the bathroom and dog rugs I left on the lines and draped over the hammock last night. Three of them are still wet. Put the two dry ones in the fluffer (we can no longer call it a “dryer”) to plump them up. Figure out where the hell to put the soggy shag rugs out of the men’s way. Continue trying to clean the kitchen and jump in and out of the shower and clean the shower and scrub the dirty pan left to soak overnight in the utility sink and dodge the dog’s ball game and scour the tired stained kitchen sink and polish the brightwork and talk Gerardo into pulling the dead fronds off the moribund 30-foot-high queen palm and persuade him to dig up the endlessly annoying frozen cape honeysuckle by the pool equipment so I can replace them with some frost-resistant Lady Banks roses and keep an eye out for the locksmith and pay Gerardo an extra $75 for the bone-crushing extra work he did and [get up! answer the door for the locksmith] finish writing Gerardo a check and wave goodbye to him. Show the locksmith what needs to be done [stop! answer the phone, accept a new assignment from the client], ask about reinforcing locks on sliding doors, discuss (stop! answer the phone, discuss plan with KJG)] recommendations for security doors and locks.
Sit down and start blogging again (drop that! With Gerardo out, drag wet rugs back out to hammock to dry in sun] and [on the way back in put away the irrigation gear Gerardo needed to fix the line his flunky cut] and zap [rattle the canful of rocks at Cassie to interrupt her barking frenzy at the locksmith] the dregs of this morning’s coffee in the microwave. Stagger back to the computer and…
…and I forget what I was going to write about this morning.
I thank God and my lucky stars for my insurance coverage through The Hartford’s reasonably priced AARP program, which has covered almost all the damage from last fall’s hailstorm. The dollar amount added up to far more than I could have paid to repair the air conditioning, the roof, and the eaves.
.
Two other small financial mercies have developed in the past couple of days.
Wellcare, the carrier for my Medicare Part D insurance (that’s the part that covers your prescription drugs, in a half-baked way), decided to inflict coupon books on its customers instead of sending monthly statements. The reason for this expensive extra hassle is unclear; the stated excuse is that it’s somehow cheaper to send one weighty box of shrink-wrapped books than twelve single pieces of paper.
I wasn’t looking forward to this development, because it looked like just another way to try to force people who dislike having to waste money on postage and envelopes to grant the insurance company access to their bank accounts. Wellcare doesn’t like it when you go in from your end to send payments through your bank’s bill-pay system; they want to get your bank account number so they can engross payment from their end at their convenience. Which ain’t a-gonna happen. Several times over the past year I’ve had to hassle with some clueless CSR when the company has accused me of delinquency after my payment had cleared the credit union a month in advance of the due date.
So when this new wad of paper landed in the mailbox, I quietly cursed again. Ripped open the envelope. Dug out a pair of scissors to hack off the plastic that they’d wrapped this stuff in. Read yet another set of complicated instructions for how to fill out yet another set of forms…
And lo! What should I come across but an opportunity to cover the entire year’s premiums in one payment!
Hallelujah! When I signed up, they explicitly refused to accept a full year’s premium with a single payment. Management must have had a change of heart. Either that or the government is forcing them to offer a full year’s payment option.
They don’t offer any discount when you pay them upfront, the way a normal insurer does, which is annoying. But at least one monthly nuisance is obviated.
Unlike Medicare B and Medigap insurance costs, Part D premiums are not large—only about $23 a month. And they’re only letting people pay through December, so that’s just $230 or so. The cost is low enough that I could easily advance it from the tax & insurance self-escrow savings. When my tax refund arrives in another month or so, I’ll reimburse that account and maybe even set aside enough for next year.
So! That frees up $23 a month from the nondiscretionary budget! Hey! A shirt or a pair of jeans a month from Costco. 🙂
And then yesterday, another small miracle: When I go into my online bank accounts to reconcile this month’s gaggle of transactions, what should I discover but a new tab: “e-Deposit.”
Say what? The credit union’s management has personfully resisted letting customers deposit checks electronically since the idea was a glimmer in some technofinancier’s eye. So what’s this?
Check it out and find yea, verily: they’ve instituted a system that lets you scan checks to disk and deposit them online.
Hot dang!
Naturally, the whiz-bangiest part of the feature, which allows you to use their system to scan and upload in one swell foop, doesn’t work with the Mac, nor does it work with wireless scanner/printers—not even if the printer is plugged into your terminal. However, they have a work-around: simply scan and store as JPEGs and then upload those.
I haven’t tried this yet. We’ll see if it works, as soon as some money arrives in the mail.
Most of my clients insist on sending checks. Google’s automatic deposit function doesn’t work, forcing me to have Adsense send payment as paper checks, too. This is a huge nuisance, because the credit union has few branches. Years ago, they closed the one that was relatively close to my house, so the nearest place to deposit checks is on the the Great Desert University’s west campus, a far piece off my beaten track. To deposit checks, I have to waste an enormous amount of time and gasoline.
Mailing checks to the credit union is out of the question. The last time I mailed a fistful of checks, the credit union lost over a thousand bucks! They finally found the checks, six weeks later, just as I was calling my clients to tell them to cancel payment. Of course, since Google employs no human beings, it was impossible to reach them, so I figured I would just have to write off that one as a loss. Thus the only way to get paper checks deposited safely is to physically carry them to the branch, walk inside, and watch the teller to be sure she manages to get it deposited in the right account (some of them have some real difficulty figuring out corporate accounts). It’s a time-consuming and, at $3.50 a gallon, increasingly expensive hassle.
So, I hope this system works. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it does—the credit union’s software dislikes Firefox and loathes Apple, and so chances are it will choke on the first JPEGs I send over there. But it’s a nice thought.
