Coffee heat rising

Japan: How to Help

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Lenten Thanks, Day 6

Thank you, God, for my safe, pretty little house and for all my quiet, courteous, and civil neighbors.

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Now we can see what happens to our safe little homes when the gods shrug. Viewing the stills and videos from Japan leaves one stunned at the enormity of the disaster befalling these extraordinary people.

What can we as individuals do to help, if anything? Twitter is awash in appeals to send money hither and yon. Be careful of these: some are scams.

If you want to make a donation, stick to recognized charities, such as the Red Cross. But bear in mind that at this point it’s unclear to what extent donations to entities outside Japan are reaching the country; you can donate directly (in yen only) to the Japanese Red Cross through Google Crisis Response. Before hurrying to send money, go to Charity Navigator for guidelines on wise giving and for ratings of charities engaged in the Japan relief effort.

Among the many creditable organizations that are acting to help, you might consider the ones listed below. However, call and confirm that donations are really being directed to crisis relief in-country.

Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders)
The Adventist Development and Relief Agency
Catholic Relief Services
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
Convoy of Hope
International Medical Corps
Oxfam USA
Real Medicine Foundation
Save the Children
Shelterbox
World Vision

I Wanna Go Swimming!

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Lenten Thanks, Day 5

Thank  you, God, for the beautiful days and nights of an Arizona springtime.

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The water in the pool is almost warm enough for a brave soul to take the plunge.

When I was 12, my mother used to take me to a “Rod and Gun Club” operated by my father’s employer, Standard Oil. It was somewhere in the East Bay, how far on the ’tother side of the Golden Gate Bridge I do not recall. What I do recall is that they had a pool whose waters were, on the warmest day of a Bay Area summer, about the temperature of the water in my backyard today.

That I would blithely dive into that refrigerator-chilly water, I’m sure, helped to convince my mother that her daughter was none too bright.

It was cold. The trick was never to just put your toe in. The trick was to throw yourself in off the side, in one bold, brave splash, a dive that could not be taken back. About two seconds later, the water felt like a cool spring breeze against your skin. It was so fun you just lost track of whether it was cold or not, and you felt sorry for your poor, fat, benighted mother that she didn’t have the nerve to follow you into the drink.

Now the question that crosses my mind, as I stand on the step with the waterline lapping up against a belly about three times the circumference of that twelve-year-old waist, is this: “If I dive into this pool, will it freeze my titties off?”

The answer: “Probably so.”

God, but wisdom takes all the joy out of life.

Flying Dog Saturday

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Lenten Thanks, Day  4

I thank God for Cassie the Corgi, who came into my life as if guided by a Divine Paw. Who would imagine ever finding such a charmer at the dog pound?

Utterly exhausted by three days and nights of fighting with the unholy Blackboard, I repaired to M’hijito’s house with Cassie the Corgi in tow, looking for company and someone else to do the driving. From there we went to our favorite overpriced gourmet grocery store, where Cassie and I claimed a table in front while M’hijito went in to get himself a sandwich and me a vast plastic cup filled with iced green tea.

Cassie likes to socialize. Oh, how this dog likes to socialize! And of course because she’s so hopelessly cute, every passer-by in town has to stop and coo over her. While we were waiting for M’hijito to emerge from the expensive depths, we had to love up every kid, every old lady, and every DINK who wandered past. And, amazingly, they had to love her back.

Moving on to Baker‘s, our favorite nursery, we wandered from one end to the other of several acres and then we began to tire. So, the humans put Cassie inside a shopping cart and rolled her around, which she didn’t seem to mind.

So we’re standing in a long line to check out, our attention wandering, when Cassie gets tired of sharing her space with a bunch of tomato plants. All of a sudden she’s in the air and flying out of the cart!

Incredibly, she landed on her feet and did not get hurt. I couldn’t believe she was OK! You’re not even supposed to let these dogs jump off the sofa. What with their short legs and their long backs, they’re prone to injuring the spine and neck if they jump or fall any distance.

What possessed her to take flight is unclear. Neither of us was paying much attention. I think a lady in the line was doting on her, and she felt the need to pursue a new admirer. M’hijito thinks she just wanted out of the cart.

So there’s another small mercy to be thankful for.

A much larger mercy: my client who lives in Japan checked in to say she and her family are OK.

She works for a university in the vastness that is Tokyo, at which of its three campuses I’m not sure. But I assume it’s the one closest to the ocean, since that’s the one that teaches the social sciences. The images coming out of Japan are terrifying. It was a great relief to learn she, her husband, and their child have come through it all safe.

We can be thankful for our blogging friends, too. Have you been following Donna Freedman as she blogs her way around the U.K.? She’s posted one interesting story after another after another. Better keep an eye on Surviving and Thriving as long as this is going on.

Frugal Scholar also has generated a series of interesting articles: a rumination on strategic defaults, a discussion of flex spending accounts, and an awesomely delicious-sounding recipe for colcannon.

Money Beagle holds forth on a particularly outrageous facet of our amazing health care system. Roger that, friend!

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability learns the official term for a type of budgeting she and I both indulge in.

Among her usual daily bouquet of frugal leads, Bargain Babe includes a link to an interesting article on what’s driving up your energy costs.

Money Crush proprietor Jackie has launched a new blog! Check it out here.

At the Digerati Life, guest blogger Kosmo holds forth about the importance of having a properly executed will, using the story of the battle over author Stieg Larsson’s estate as a cautionary tale.

Jim at Bargaineering asks a question I’ll bet no one has ever asked you before!

Over at the Ultimate Money Blog, Mrs. Money describes a discussion with Mr. M over low-rent toilet paper.

101 Centavos relates some interesting observations that show the day-to-day effects of the economic slowdown on the world around us.

My Journey to Millions features two particularly interesting articles this week: guest blogger Les Roberts reflects the extent to which the Credit CARD Act has had short- or long-term benefits for consumers, and Evan addresses the question of whether it’s a good thing to stipulate how inherited funds can be spent.

Welp, speaking of Cassie the Corgi, it’s time to get up and feed her and me. Then it’s back to the Blackboard Wars. Later!

I Hate Blackboard

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Lenten thanks, Day 3

I think God for the glorious experience of the All Saints choir and the generosity of its director in allowing me to join and sing along with it. The spectacular voices of the chamber choir, the privilege of being near its extraordinarily talented  members, the fellowship of good friends, and the wonder of learning about music and voice are beyond description.

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If anyone ever asks you to teach an online course using Blackboard’s course management software, RUN! Run away as fast as you can!!! If your chair or dean informs you that your courses will be converted via Blackboard to online or hybrid format, willy-nilly, by way of getting with the current money-grasping trend in higher education, fill out the application for that job at Walmart.

Do not do, my friends, what I have done
In the House of the Sinking Sun…

Whatever you try to do in Blackboard, Blackboard will scotch you, block you, screw you, deconstruct you, make you look like a raving fool. Whom the Blackboard gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Last night I worked yet again to midnight, undoing the latest devastation Blackboard’s peculiarities have inflicted on my online course. Yesterday morning it was up and back to work at 4:00 a.m.; this morning I slept to 6:00 because I doped myself with not one but two Benadryl after I stumbled away from the computer along about 12:15 a.m.

Running up to this course, I spent hours and hours and…nay, not hours: days, yea, days and days and days morphing into weeks preparing illustrated online lectures in a function Blackboard calls “Voice Presentation.” At the end of all that work, what I ended up with was not optimal—far from it!—but at least it was sort of OK. It wasn’t the digitally recorded PowerPoint presentations I’d made—Blackboard won’t hold even a small PowerPoint, much less one with fifteen or twenty slides and a few spoken words explaining them, even though the user manual indicates it will. It apparently doesn’t have enough memory. WhatEVER.

After I’d made these elegant PowerPoint shows, at great expenditure of time and effort, and then learned they could not be uploaded, I had to extract each and every accursed JPEG; save every one of them separately to disk; upload them, one by interminable one, into Blackboard’s faux blog function; and then link the faux blog posts to Blackboard’s Voice Presentation. This took unimaginable numbers of hours, and it entailed my having to record, re-record, re-re-record, and re-re-re-record my 15-minute spiels ad nauseum.

I am so flicking sick of repeating those damn lecturoids I could throw up. But now I get to do them ALL. OVER. AGAIN.

Duplicating the fall course caused Blackboard to kill all the faux blog-to-Voice Presentation links, every bloody one of them. Actually, instead of bringing the links over to the copied faux blogs, it kept the links to the faux blogs from the fall semester’s Blackboard shell. Naturally, the spring students don’t have access to last fall’s course. So when they try to enter the Voice Presentation, they’re informed that they can’t access the course material.

This quirk, of course, was not visible to me at the time I copied over the new course; because I have admin access to all my old courses, the VP’s worked just fine for me. Not until the eve of the first project’s due date did I start getting frantic e-mails…I can’t get in! Blackboard’s Help Desk can’t figure out the problem. Blackboard’s Help Desk can’t help me. Blackboard’s Help Desk says you have to change all the links.

After some thrashing around, I finally figure out—almost by accident—what is causing the problem. I go into the Voice Presentation to try to move the links (about a dozen of them…) to the faux blogs that were copied into the current semester’s BB course. But…oh yes, BUT…in the transition, Blackboard has disappeared that function! Nowhere can I find an option to set the URL. It is GONE.

For Christ’s sake.

Undaunted, I dream up a workaround: Record the lecturoid on a Voice Board, which will give me 20 minutes of recording time. This requires me to pull up the blog with its images on my laptop and then explain the images into the desktop’s microphone while scrolling through them on the laptop.

Better yet (hang onto your hats, fellow eddycators), accessing the resulting pushmi-pullyu requires the students to open two browser tabs, sign into Blackboard in both tabs, run the Voice Board lecturoid in one tab, and, in the other tab, follow along in the blogoid, manually scrolling down the page.

Gaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Go ahead. YOU try to explain this process to members of a student body whose constituents believe France is our  mortal enemy, Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, Catholics are not Christians, and the word episcopal is pronounced ep-is-COP-al.

Blackboard has two fundamental problems.

First, it’s bloatware. It’s chuckablock full of features that no one uses and that, after a little experience with Blackboard, no one in their right mind would even think of trying to use. This bloatware costs your school money while it occupies server space.

Second, it is hideously difficult to use because its functions are unlike those in any other program and because it is utterly unintuitive. In some cases, to do the same action in more than one part of the program requires you to engage a different set of commands. So, not only are these commands unlike anything you run into in, say, Microsoft or Apple programs, they’re unlike what you run into within the program itself. To learn to use the program takes a long time, a lot of effort and study. Schools that subscribe to it have to provide endless hours of seminars and workshops to train faculty in it, and then….

Yes. And THEN. When you finally have it almost mastered, Blackboard “upgrades” and changes the whole god da^^ned thing around!

Now you get to start all over again. Even experienced users have to start almost from zero and relearn it from the ground up. And what did you get with the so-called upgrade? More bells and whistles that you would never use even if you thought they wouldn’t screw you up. Which is to say more bloatware!

If I’d had any clue I would be wasting so many unpaid hours and subjected to such outrageous levels of frustration, I would never have agreed to put this course online. Yes, teaching online obviates your having to drive out to campus and stand in front of a section for three hours each week. But a full semester’s 48 hours of face time is as nothing compared to the uncountable number of hours I’ve wasted, and continue to waste, on Blackboard.


Hemorrhaging Money!

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Lenten Thanks: Day 2

I thank God for my friends, those who live near and far, people I’ve met in teaching, on the choir, and through blogging. They are the gems that brighten my life.

Lordie! Money is pouring out of my bank accounts like it was water! One blinding expense after another: the $615 for the paint and repair job; $81 for the paint itself, another $98 for the light fixtures and junk from Lowes; $100 for a season’s worth of chlorine tablets for the pool; $97 for the little self-indulgence at Ecocentricity; $250 at Costco to restock the dwindling grocery cache; $78 for gasoline…gaaaahhhhh!

Even after paying for the $97 for the purse out of the diddle-it-away savings account, I have $29.43 left to last until the end of the current credit-card budget cycle: that’s another 11 days!

The $615 will also have to come out of that account, I expect. No word from the insurance company about whether any or all of that will be reimbursed. Sean the Adjuster probably hasn’t recovered from the shock yet. Actually, I sent the invoices for the paint and the light fixtures, too, so there’s an outside chance that the $179 for those items will come back. Someday. Not, presumably, in time to pay this month’s AMEX bill, though.

Hm. Half a tank of gas left, and today was the last day of class before spring break. If I can minimize driving, I just might stretch the gas long enough to last until the 21st. Running low on meat for the dog, which means least one grocery store run, but that won’t consume an entire half-tank. A single grocery run, however, could easily consume the $29 remaining in the budget, though; especially if it includes a meat purchase.

There seems to be no end to the extraordinary costs. I haven’t had the nerve to open the bill from the Mayo for the copays and whatever Medigap didn’t cover. More than $29.43, I’ll bet! Then starting the first week of the next billing cycle, a series of visits to a physical therapist begins, in an effort to help the injured shoulder that never healed fully from last year’s fall and dislocation—presumably a copay hit every time I walk through that door. And a trip to the dentist to smooth off the broken, jagged molars and build a new night guard: bare minimum 400 buckolas. And the turn signal on my car is broken, and the hinge on the visor has worked loose so the thing falls down in front of my face every time the sun gets in my eyes, and a chip in the car’s paint needs to be touched up…who knows what that will cost?

Then there’s that security door I’d really like to buy.

Well, by the time $615 is sucked out of savings, there won’t be anything left for a security door. Guess I’d better not count on the insurance replacing that amount. {sigh}

On the bright side, the electric bill arrived: only $58!!!!!

That is one of the lowest power bills in recorded memory. Last year the March bill was $65. It dropped to $57 in April, after the month of March passed without my having to turn the heat or AC on once. Last month I did have the heater on a few times, and once or twice I forgot to turn it off when I went to bed. So evidently the new unit actually is going to save a few bucks on the electric bill.

And the new accountant issued forth my tax returns: $3002 coming back to me and $1,500 back to M’hijito for the mortgage interest deduction. That certainly helps our cause.

Not only that, but her bills were just slightly more than half what the defunct tax lawyer charged to do the personal and corporate returns last year. Even after paying for both sets of returns, I still end up with $2,500 to add to this year’s survival fund. She’s more aggressive than T.L. and is willing to claim many more deductions than I’ve done in the past. So this is a distinct improvement.

That $2,500 plus the $3,700 left from RASL after topping off the Roth IRA plus the projected net $3,000 from next summer’s teaching will delay my having to draw down retirement savings until November of 2012. After that, according to my famously sophisticated calculations, I still may not have to pull out 12 drawdowns a year, as long as I’m working and as long as I can continue to land two sections each summer.

In 2012, after the short-term survival savings run out, I’ll have to make two drawdowns to live on. In 2013, if I get a comparable tax refund and if I manage to teach three and three in the academic year and pick up two sections in the summer, I might only have to take seven drawdowns. So that would be nice. The less I have to take out of retirement savings, the longer I can live on those funds after I’m too feeble to keep teaching.

Our Hero

So. In spite of the impression that more money than Croesus could imagine is flowing out of the coffers, I guess I can’t complain.

Image: Scrooge McDuck. © 1981 Carl Barks. Link to Wikipedia.com.

Real Estate: Catastrophic

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Lenten Thanks: Day 1

I thank God for my beautiful son, who has grown into a hard-working man with great common sense, a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, and deep loyalty for his loved ones.

The dominant Realtor in the neighborhood just sent out her occasional newsletter. A house in the area just to the north, which is starting to look pretty blighted, sold for $58,900.

In my neighborhood, the best price was $222,000. But that was for a 2,013-square-foot house. Apply the square-foot price to my shack and you get $203,277. Not good, considering that I paid $232,000…before the bubble started to bloat.

At the time I decided to pay off the mortgage on my last house—the sale of which made it possible for me to pay for this house in cash—my financial advisers had their predictable litter of kittens. Conventional wisdom so values the tax write-off on residential mortgages that most people are convinced it’s best to be in debt up to their teeth, as long as it’s so-called “good debt.”

Well, one thing the present depression has shown us is that there is no such thing as “good debt.” Debt is debt, and it’s all bad for your financial health, unless you’re a major corporation or a government, in which case leveraged debt is a characteristic of the alternate universe in which you dwell. For the homeowner, mortgage debt is no better than credit card debt; in fact, it’s probably worse, because it’s so much more massive and because its collateral is the roof over your head.

If I owed on this house, heaven only knows how far underwater I’d be…and that wouldn’t count the $61,000 loss we’re taking on the downtown house’s mortgage. And of course, 61 grand isn’t the half of it: it’s not the difference between how much you owe and how much the house is really worth that counts; it’s the phenomenal amount of mortgage interest that’s swirling down the drain for every underwater homeowner in the country. If we end up stuck with the downtown house for 30 years, until the mortgage is paid off, we will have paid twice the amount of the loan for a house that’s worth about 64 percent its sale price.

We certainly will lose that house and all the money we’ve put into it. Unless a miracle happens very soon, we won’t have much choice other than to walk.

But at least I can say this: I’m not going to lose my own house, and it’s not costing anything in mortgage payments. Thank God I made that seemingly “foolish” decision, all those years ago.

LOL! Now, if only She had been watching out over us when we jumped off the cliff to buy the downtown house.

🙂