Coffee heat rising

Save the Last Dance for Me…

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The Workman Waltz begins again! Darn. I thought my dance card had been used up and tossed away. But nooo… Now we start another round, first with an air-conditioning contractor, then with a roofer, then with…???

Actually after the new air conditioner has been installed and the five-year-old roof has been stripped off and rebuilt, there won’t be enough to repair and coat the CoolDeck, even after the alleged $1,500 tax break on the high-efficiency AC unit.

It would be a break-even deal if the $1,500 materializes. Somehow, though, I doubt I’ll ever see a penny of that. It’s a “tax rebate.” How can you get a rebate on nothing? It’s highly unlikely I’ll owe any taxes this year. I’ve barely earned enough to get by, and thanks to the combined costs of Medicare Part B, Medigap, Medicare Part D, long-term care insurance, and one pair of glasses, my health care bills far exceed 7.5% of gross income. The EnergyStar folks observe,

These energy efficiency tax credits are technically “non-refundable,” which means you can’t get more money back in tax credits than you pay in federal income taxes (your tax liability). Check your last year’s tax return to get a sense of your tax liability (line 61 on the 2008 1040 form, called “total tax”). You can claim all of your tax credits as long as your tax liability, is greater than zero after all tax credits have been applied. . . . If you don’t pay any taxes, then you can’t get the credit.

Probably I should’ve opted for the cheaper, less efficient unit. However, I’m hoping that a better unit will allow me to cool the house into the comfortable range without raising the power bills a lot. One summer of sitting here sweating 24 hours a day was quite enough.

My beloved roofer came in with a bid about $2,000 more than he charged to reroof the house five years ago. I realize petroleum prices have risen, but that seems a bit much. So I’m getting another bid on that. If the other guy’s price is about the same, then the insurance payment of $11,300 will fall about $1,270 short of covering just those two repair costs—air conditioner and roofing. The CoolDeck, I guess, will just have to stay the way it is. Gives the place character!

Rustic, very rustic.

This morning I signed up with Angie’s List in order to get access to their recommended contractors. If you’re interested in this outfit, BTW, when you go to pay the forty bucks for a year’s membership, they ask if you have a coupon code. At that point google promo codes for Angie’s List and up will come a bunch of them. I got in for $31, which was still (IMHO) a bit much.

Can’t say I recommend Angie’s List. It was great that first year, when it was free (they give out freebie memberships in markets they’re trying to break into). But the full-fledged version is bloated and confusing to navigate. To my great annoyance, I found that top-rated businesses had some “D” and “F” ratings once you got into the details. Apparently if a business wangles an “honor” it goes right to the top of the list. In the searches I did, businesses further down the list sometimes had better overall ratings, occasionally with more respondents.

Eventually I came across a roofing company whose sign I recognized from the upscale section of the neighborhood. We’re overrun with fly-by-night outfits right now, come in from all over the country to participate in the insurance-funded feeding frenzy. At any given moment, about one in five roofs in the neighborhood is being torn up and rebuilt. This outfit is well reviewed—no one reported a bad experience, and one guy said he’d learned about the company from a building contractor with whom he’d done some business. So that sounded mildly positive. He’s coming over tomorrow.

Lordie! There are people out there reporting that they paid $10,000 and $12,000 for roofing jobs. What are they putting on those shacks?

“Ya-a-as, we decided to go with the sterling silver shingles instead of the solid copper. Copper is so 2009!”

Some Angie’s List respondents report paying comparable amounts to replace air-conditioning units—$8,000; $10,000…good grief! For residential construction!

Evidently that storm was sent by God Herself to lift Phoenix’s economy out of the doldrums.

Okay, okay, I’m glad (I guess) to get yet another new roof and a brand-new 14-seer air conditioning unit on the insurance company’s dime. Not thrilled: if I don’t own an interest in that company now, I certainly have in the recent past, and I regard it as my insurance company. Paying out for “catastrophic” hail storms cuts into the profits. But it’s good, in its way. The house needed a new heat pump, and I certainly didn’t have $5,200 laying around to pay for it. I’d planned to let it go the same way as the aging Dog Chariot: run it until it falls apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.

And you know when that would be: at 5:15 p.m. on the evening before the hottest July 4 in history, which will fall on a Friday.

{sigh} I love workmen, respect workmen, learn a lot from workmen. But oh! What a job it is to ride herd on them! It’s true, I’ve had a couple years of respite. But I hoped for about a 15-year break!

🙄

Image: Two Roofers at Work in New Orleans, Lousiana. Editor B. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Hurrah!

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Evan, our favorite conservative and proprietor of My Journey to Millions, is a father! The Wife brought a baby boy into the world, and Evan lived to tell the story. Congratulations, Evan.

If you’d like to celebrate the arrival, consider subscribing to LoveDrop, a micro-giving group that engineers monthly gifts to needy individuals and families. For as little as a dollar a month, you can join a community whose founders include Budgets Are Sexy founder J. Money, obviously a high recommendation. Do be aware that it’s not a 501(c)3 charity; it’s a for-profit group dedicated to doing good works. Fifty percent of revenues go to recipients, 20 percent to taxes, and 30 percent to operating costs. Given that the group has to pay taxes (unlike traditional charities), this is a very good ratio.

w00t! First Payment from Amazon!

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Well! The first payment ever from Amazon Affiliates just surfaced! It ain’t much, I’ll tellya…but it’s sure better than a hit on the head.

For a week, I thought it hadn’t landed in the S-corp’s checking account. The darn thing didn’t appear in the credit union’s online page! Today, though, I got around to reconciling the paper statements that came in the mail and discovered the credit posted on a date far from the one Amazon posted it.

Kewl!

Only trouble with electronic funds transfers is that you can’t frame one and put it on the wall. 🙂

O Tannenbaum, O Fakenbaum: Real Christmas tree or fake?

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What’s your preference? A real tree or a fake one to stick in your living room and adorn with Christmas lights and gewgaws? Over at Bargain Babe, the conversation is under way: she lists the pro’s and cons of each (fake ones are cheaper over the long run but shed pollutants—maybe even lead—and are expensive upfront; real ones are cheap as a one-time cost but cost more over time, and besides, they suck up fuel), and then leaves it to readers to consider.

Fake purple Christmas tree

Reminds me of my misbegotten childhood. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, of course, we had no access to any kind of tree, unless you count the occasional date palm as a “tree.” Everyone had fake trees, purchased at the commissary.

When I was small, my mother had a weird white thing made of…what? some sort of early plastic? Nylon? I believe it came with its own built-in colored Christmas lights. It was about two feet high. She would put it on a table, drape the table and base of the…uhm, “tree” with white flocking to suggest “snow,” and that was that. Far more interesting to a little kid was the tableau she built by arranging some of the flocking around a small  metal mirror set on a table and then placing a couple of plastic reindeer atop the mirror. This was meant to evoke wild game standing on a frozen pond.

All very fascinating to a child who never saw snow until she was almost 18 years old.

Not too long after my first exposure to snow, I got my first exposure to marriage. My husband insisted on bringing a real pine tree into the house and setting it up in the front window.

This custom has always mystified me. What is it about killing a living thing and then watching it wither for two weeks that appeals?

Oh well.

Christmas tree

For some years, we had these trees. The house we’d moved into had thick, luxuriant shag carpeting. Know what dead pine trees do? They drop their needles. The needles—scores of them!—would work their way into the warp and woof of that fancy shag carpet.

As it develops, there’s a reason pine needles are called needles. I would walk around my house barefoot. For months after Christmas, whenever I’d walk into the living room, I’d get a jab on the bottom of the foot! No amount of vacuuming could get all those damn needles out of the carpeting.

Mercifully, the price of Christmas trees outpaced the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. One year my husband allowed as how the tree business was getting a bit out of hand.

That was when we got the Christmas jade plant.

Jade Plant

As was the fashion in that decade, I had put a jade plant on a stand in front of the south-facing two-story-high window that graced our living room. The jade plant shivered with joy and soon grew to be something of a jade sequoia: large and green and muscular.

Come Christmastime, I started decorating the thing with ornaments and aluminum icicles.

It worked. For several years we were free of Christmas trees, thanks to the Christmas jade plant.

Eventually, though, the jade plant got a fungus and croaked. By then my husband was making an income that was large and green and muscular. The Christmas tree discussion returned.

Don’t remember how, but I managed to convince him that we preferred a living tree. I must have threatened to sue his a$$ if I ever got another pine needle in my foot. At any rate, however it came about, after the demise of the jade plant we took to buying small potted pine trees at Home Depot. These would survive for two or three years in a good-sized pot. Once Christmas was over, we’d tote the living Christmas tree outdoors, water it well, and there it would reside for a year. The following winter it would be hauled back inside, tormented for two or three weeks, and then dragged back outdoors.

black widow spider

Well. You know, a tree is its own little habitat. Certain creatures like to live in trees. Some of these creatures like to lay their eggs in trees. One such creature is the black widow, Arizona’s finest earwig-, mosquito-, and cockroach-eating machine. This worthy arachnid is nice to have around the house. The outside of the house. It’s not something you want indoors, because it can deliver quite the nasty bite.

One year while the living Christmas tree was enjoying the out of doors, one of the ladies deposited a clutch of eggs in its boughs. When we brought it inside, the warmth of the heating system caused the babes to hatch.

Do you know what happens when a clutch of infant black widows gets into the air-conditioning ducts of a 3,300-square-foot house? No? That’s good. It’s best not to know.

The following Christmas we acquired a very convincing green phony Christmas tree. A fakenbaum, as it were. It was so believable that the only way you could be sure it wasn’t real was by the absence of pine pitch aroma. That, and by walking across the carpet barefooted.

The fakenbaum lasted for many years. I rather liked it. It didn’t hurt my feet. Setting it up inside the house didn’t entail killing anything. And the only thing that wanted to live in it was a vintage plastic troll.

Troll doll

Images:

Alarming purple fake Christmas tree: Santa’sOwn.com, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

American Christmas Tree. Iknowthegoods at en.wikipedia. GNU Free Documentation License.

Jade plant: Crassula ovata presented as an indoor bonsai, Emmanuelm (talk), Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Credible fake Christmas tree, Mfisherkirshner, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

A Quarter Saved, a Quarter Earned…

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This morning my friend La Maya and I joined a Starbuck’s drive-through line. Wanting to empty my purse of heavy change, I handed her $2.25 in quarters to cover the cost of a café Americano.

She put the change aside and paid for both coffees with long green.

Why?

Because, she explained, she stashes every quarter that comes her way to defray the annual state automobile registration fee.

Car registration in Arizona is exorbitant—ours is among the highest in the country. Last year, La Maya said, she paid over $140 to register her Toyota. Though she’s not one of those folks who resent paying taxes, she does regard the auto registration fee as a gouge. Which, of course, is just what it is. It’s particularly galling to see that the state has built a huge, expensive bureaucracy for the purpose of collecting this particular rip, especially when our hatchet-faced governor watches a man die unnecessarily for lack of adequate Medicaid coverage and remarks “we can’t afford it.”

La Maya says it makes her feel slightly less annoyed to pay it when she has a chunk of the bill set aside in her small change collection. Last year her quarter stash covered more than half the bill.

Good idea, isn’t it? When I have loose change (not often, because I mostly pay with plastic), I also toss it into a jar. But it’s not dedicated to anything, other than collecting dust and taking up space. This way, once a year you clear the clutter away, and you use it for a specific purpose.

Tiny House Demo

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Here’s something kinda charming:

Neat, huh? I love his “tiny fireplace…but it’s a tiny house”! 🙂 And how about that scenery in those places where  he’s plopped the things?

Every  now and again Mary at Simply Forties will ruminate about these minuscule little gems and wonder…could a person actually live in one of them? Like…permanently?

Pour moi, I don’t know. I occupy a four-bedroom house. It’s a little loose for me, but at 1,680 square feet, it’s not so huge I want to get free of it. One of the bedrooms is devoted to storage—it holds a freezer that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen; the closet holds linens that won’t fit in the linen closet, some art and sewing supplies, during the summer the space heaters, and during the winter the fans. A wallful of old bookcases holds food staples that won’t fit in the kitchen pantry and shouldn’t be stored in 115-degree heat in the garage. Another bedroom holds my office, file storage, and office supplies; I spend most of my waking hours here, operating not one, not two, but three enterprises. The master bedroom is just another closet—none of these rooms is very large—but I can’t imagine doing without it.

I could, however, do without the bedroom that’s occupied by the television, since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Last night I sat down to veg out while writing a post for another site and found the offerings so bad, with all four channels of NPR begging for money and just garbage on all the other stations, that it didn’t even suffice as background noise.

And I could live without two bathrooms. And the extra living room that is the “family room.” That would cut about 470 square feet off my present space, bringing the desired living space down to about 1,210 square feet.

The underwater downtown house is about 1,300 square feet, to my mind just about ideal for one person. The kitchen is large enough to function. The dining room is big enough to entertain friends. The living room will hold an overstuffed sofa and chair (nonnegotiables, in my book); one of the bedrooms has plenty of space for an office, one is roomy enough for a queen-sized bed or maybe even a king; and the little back room will do for extra storage or as a guest room or sitting room.

What bothers  me about Jay’s minidigs, besides the fact that you’d have to be pathologically tidy to live there, is the loft bedroom. It’s a firetrap. Get a fire started below you—propane is wildly flammable—and you’re dead. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get out of there. Check out that teeny little window: cute, but a grown man couldn’t begin to fit through it. And if he did, where would be be? Over the top of a flaming porch?

HUH-uh. Don’t think we’ll be contemplating life by Walden Pond in that thing.

Now the one in Texas that Mary photographed looks more reasonable. The bedroom is on the ground floor (there doesn’t appear to be a second floor). With some exuberant downsizing, you could indeed fit inside that place. At least, one person could. Two might be a little tight. Personally, I’d like more kitchen space—I cook a lot, and I’m not seeing enough space there for someone who likes to cook and likes to eat.

It’s a perfect little guest house or vacation getaway. As Mary points out, to make it permanently livable it would be good to have a place for a washer and dryer (or a washer alone…you hardly need a dryer, at least in a warm climate). For the $45,000 Mary’s friend paid to install this on her lot, you might be able to get an ordinary manufactured home in a park model; Cavco is selling them for around $49,000. Clayton claims to build a three-bedroom mobile home for as little as 49 grand…but who knows what you really get for that.

For not very much more that $45,000, I suspect you could get enough space that you wouldn’t have to ponder whether you really could live in it. You’d need to buy a plot of land, of course…there’s the rub! But if you already have one, this would be an inexpensive way to build on it.