Coffee heat rising

Penny-wise, Pound-foolish?

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So yesterday I met with SDXB to borrow his digital blood-pressure monitor. Among other things. We met at Infamous Overpriced Gourmet Grocery Store over coffee and then went for a hike in the mountain preserve maintained by the City of Glendale. When we got to the park, he handed over the machine.

Interesting little device. It operates on batteries. You strap a cuff thing around your arm, attaching it with Velcro, and then push a couple of buttons. It blows up the cuff until you feel like your arm is gonna go numb and then beeps a while as it measures your systolic and diastolic blood pressure, throwing in your pulse rate as a lagniappe.

So by way of showing me how to use it, he lashed me up in the thing and punched the appropriate buttons. Resulting figures: about 140 over 80, borderline hypertension. That was what appeared at the doctor’s office, occasioning this expedition. I knew SDXB had a monitor, since he’s been gulping blood pressure meds for years. Instead of ponying up $100 or so for my own, I thought I’d borrow his, at least until we know whether I have to be on the damn pills, too.

Okay. Now he wants me to demonstrate that I’ve learned how it works. I reapply the cuff and punch the buttons.

Lo! Two minutes after the 141/80 reading, I’m down to 124/78.

Well, that can’t be right, we figure. So we try it again: 120/77.

What? We guess the last two figures are more or less accurate, since I was nervous about the gadget (I just hate this stuff!), and because some a**hole cut me off as we were driving from coffee to the park, swerved into the park ahead of me, and grabbed the parking place SDXB had passed up for me to take. The park was crowded, and I don’t like fighting for parking. And a**holes in any environment, on the road or elsewhere, tend to send me through the roof. Presumably those factors combined to create the higher figure, after which I must have calmed down.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But…  Yesterday after I got home, out of curiosity I tried using it again. The first reading was an astronomical 158/130! That’s higher than any doctor’s gadget has ever registered, despite the fact that I hate few things more than I hate being in a doctor’s office.

Error? So I tried it again. Two minutes later, we’re down to 139/84, a drop in systolic presssure of 19 points between 11:13 and 11:15 a.m.

Interesting. What happens if you run the doodad a third time? Magically, you get a new reading of 129/70, a ten-point drop in one minute.

I tried this experiment twice more during the day, since the docs had asked me to check my blood pressure at different hours. Same thing happened: I got readings that ranged from 120/75 to 148/86 in a matter of minutes.

Either something very strange is going on with my body or this contraption has an accuracy problem.

I surf the Net and discover that, for optimal accuracy, digital monitors need to have fresh batteries. SDXB had said the batteries could run down over theperiod the doctors want me to indulge in this exercise. So, when I got up at 4:00 this morning, I changed out the batteries.

This resulted in sort of normal figures. Sort of. The high was a pleasing (but not very credible) 122/78. But a second test, two minutes later, came up with 106/70, barely higher than the average corpse’s. And, if we buy this at all, a 16-point drop in exactly one minute. Another 60 seconds later, it was back up to an almost healthy 113/69.

{sigh} I don’t know what to make of all this. If anything. It may be that I need to buy a new machine—SDXB’s is several years old. Really, I don’t want to spend $70 on something that’s totally unnecessary. But on the other hand, I don’t want to be stuck on medications that are totally unnecessary for the rest of my life, either. Or not get the meds if they are necessary.

It’s possible that Medicare covers blood pressure monitors. I’ll have to ask today or tomorrow. But then I’ll still have the hassle and expense of having to schlep it to a doctor’s office and get it calibrated—and who knows what they’ll charge for that privilege? Like I have nothing else to do and nothing else to spend my money on!

🙄

Image:
Steven Fruitsmaak, Automatic Brachial Sphygmomanometer Showing Grade 2 Arterial Hypertension. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Wonderful magazine! And a new FaM feature

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A week or so ago I stumbled upon a copy of a publication I hadn’t seen in quite a while: The Economist. It was hidden among the bundles of tabloids and advertising packages disguised as women’s magazines that abide around Safeway’s cash registers. Picked it up…thought, electrified, hallelujah! The Brits have still got content!

Content? OMG does this thing have content: real, full-length ARTICLES, not blurbs, not squibs. And they’re about issues that matter, not movie stars’ sex lives! The thing contains actual reporting (you remember? facts, and lots of them?). And when commenters editorialize, they have something to say…they don’t blather.

It’s a miracle.

So I grabbed it off the counter, brought it home, have been reading it all week long. Today on the way home from the Mayo* I stopped at a Whole Paycheck to pick up a couple of items that aren’t available in regular supermarkets around here, and what should I find but a new issue of the thing.

It’s always enlightening to listen to what observers in other countries have to say about American doings. This week’s cover story is “Angry America,” the centerpiece of reportage on the elections nationwide. Says an unnamed editorialist:

It takes an effort these days to recall the thrill that surged through the world [the world!] when Barack Obama was elected America’s president. It was not only that he was the first black person to assume the globe’s greatest office. He seemed to be preternaturally thoughtful, dignified and decent; a man who could heal America’s wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad. Though too many were swept away on a collective longing to see hope triumph over experience, none of it seemed wholly unreasonable at the time. Yes, many thought, he can.

Didn’t we, though? What a perfect nutshell summary of the desperate optimism so many of us clung to.

Two years later, the magnitude of the let-down is palpable everywhere; and at home the president is caught in a vice. To many on the left, he is a cowardly compromiser, whose half-baked plans to get America back to work have done little to help those who voted for him, and whose health-care and financial reforms were gutted at the behest of special interests. To many on the right, he seems a doctrinaire spendthrift who has squandered trillions of dollars on wasteful bureaucracy, mortgaging the future while failing to grapple with the present. To centrists who backed him, including this newspaper, he has been a disappointment, his skills as a president falling far short of his genius as a campaigner.

Geez. Two years in four sentences.

And ain’t it the truth? Certainly for those of us whose wing-nuts rotate counterclockwise, it’s disappointing that Obama did not stand firm, that he caved to the right and its industrial controllers. Where healthcare was concerned, his position should have been all or nothing: if he couldn’t get a single-payer system, he should have let the whole mess revert to the status quo and let the voters enjoy another round of higher premiums for less coverage. About Afghanistan, he should have pointed out, firmly and repeatedly, that he is not the man who got us into Afghanistan, nor is he the man who lied to take us into Iraq when we should have been going after bin Laden in Afghanistan and Pakistan; he should have reminded everyone why we invaded Afghanistan and why we cannot just turn around and walk away.

Interestingly, the Brits have a more sanguine view of President Obama and his accomplishments to date. “In our view,” says The Economist, “the rage directed at Mr Obama is overdone.”

Overdone rage seems to be very  much in vogue here, these days. About the main source of that rage, the editor continues,

The slow pace of job re-creation is primarily the result of consumers and companies trying to rebuild their finances. Balance-sheet recessions always take time to recover from. Mr Obama is guilty of promising that the pain would be over sooner than was ever likely. But he did not cause the bust, and he deserves more credit than he is getting for steering America clear of a much worse fate, especially considering the constraints of a political system designed to make big changes difficult. He was right to go for a big, bold and immediate stimulus plan. He has been right to resist, with minor exceptions, calls for a wave of protectionism. He is guilty of having no credible medium-term plan to reduce the deficit. But then nor do the Republicans; and it was they, after all, who oversaw the tax cuts, the entry into two wars and the financial collapse that are the source of most of America’s gigantic deficit.

. . . He was correct to try to deal with a dreadful system that leaves tens of millions of Americans without access to health cover, though he should probably have postponed doing so until the economy had recovered.

Just so. Here, too, Obama or his press secretary and machine should have been blowing his own horn. These facts should have been talked up in the press—at endless length and at the same volume at which the anti’s have been shouting.

The United States, whose concerns grow  more parochial as the country loses economic and political clout, is only one part of the world on which The Economist reports. Each issue is sectioned into departments that cover specific regions: The Americas, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Europe, Britain. Every part of the publication is full of well crafted, solidly reported articles. Since so much of its content informs the sort of thing I write for Funny about Money, I think I’m going to have Funny’s parent entity, The Copyeditor’s Desk, subscribe to it. Just now they have a bargain rate going on.

It’s not cheap, but for something that brings this much high-quality reporting straight to your door once a week, it’s worth it.

And this brings me to…

Something New for Funny about Money

Got a new idea: I thought it would be cool to have a separate page that would list some of the products I’ve found and would like to recommend because they work well, meet a special need, or just are nifty, and also some of the goodies friends have told me about.

After some rumination, during which I tried to figure out if I could make an RSS feed to a single regularly updated page within FaM and learned that nooooo, that won’t work, I decided to recycle the dormant Half-Off Diet site. I don’t happen to feel like buying yet another domain name, so for our purposes I’m just going to keep the URL, but rename the site Funny and Friends’ Picks.

The RSS feed at the upper right will show recent posts. Eventually I’ll try to put together an index in a separate page on Funny about Money, so you can see an alphabetical list of products and services featured there. For the nonce, though, a category list will appear at Picks, so if you’d like to see if we ever talked about, say, immersion blenders, you could click on “small appliances” or “household gadgets” (whenever they come up…I’ll have to enter a post on a given category to make it appear in the list). When there’s an affiliate link for Amazon, I’ll include it, but not all entries lend themselves to that. For example, soon I’ll post a link to La Maya’s paintings, which of course are not available through the Gigantic Virtual Warehouse Store.

I think this could be a fun and maybe even a useful service to FaM readers. I hope you’ll take time occasionally to browse through it, and if you have any ideas for stuff to include, e-mail me at funnyaboutmoney {{at}} gmail.com, or just leave a comment here.

🙂

* So what happened at the Mayo? I showed up there bright and early this morning, half-starved, to be poked and jabbed. A few hours later, the doctor’s nurse called to report on the test results: all completely normal! No H. pylori, no anemia (i.e., no ulcer and probably no cancer), no liver malfunction, no pancreatitis. Someday I may even be able to have a glass of wine again. Meanwhile, as the body winds down from the mighty dose of stress delivered by three months without enough income to cover base expenses followed by Social Security ripping off a whole month’s worth of pay and leaving me a thousand dollars short for a fourth month, I’m beginning to feel a lot better. It looks like I’m gunna live to write another blog post, after all.

Stress Control Redux

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In another two and a half hours, I’ve got to traipse over to the Mayo to begin a round of what promises to be increasingly invasive testing. What joy.

My doc and his bouncing young resident think what ails me could be any of a number of things: an H. pylori infection, acid reflux, pancreatitis, impending liver failure. Some of the possibilities make being infected with the first bacterium proven to cause cancer look good. Oh, and by the way, there’s this high blood pressure issue…

Whatever it is, I’ve found it seems to relate directly to stress. The more harassed I feel, the more upset the stomach gets, and vice versa. After spending a day hanging out first with KJG and then with SDXB, essentially doing nothing but relaxing and chatting, I suddenly felt a lot better. Then, a couple of days ago, a stress-filled day that included meeting with doctors who kept me sitting in an examining room twiddling my thumbs for almost an hour left me with a volcano in my gut.

Here’s what Dr. Funny thinks: Since the beginning of the summer, I have been so stressed worrying about money and working endless hours for little or no pay, it’s maxed out my ability to cope.

Making it through the summer without enough cash coming in to cover base expenses was very difficult, indeed. From pinching pennies all spring, I had enough saved from teaching to pay the bills in May, June, July, and August, but only just. By the beginning of summer, the account that held spending money had run dry. Although I was assigned to teach three sections in the fall, arranging them in three eight-week sessions (one the first half of the semester and two in the second half) meant that in late August and September, too little would come in to pay the bills. Social Security and teaching income together were simply not enough to live on.

Then when Social Security pulled the stunt of withholding an entire month’s benefit check for the crime of earning $340 more than allowed, that pushed me to the point of not being able to cope at all. You can tear your hair trying to figure out how to get by only so many hours before you go bald.

Add to that the fact that I spend way, way, way too many hours in front of the computer, most of them pursuing sub-minimum wage pay.

Online courses are obscenely time-consuming. I am sick and tired of fiddling with Blackboard, which is about the most cumbersome bloatware this side of Microsoft. Nay! Blackboard makes Microsoft look thin and lithe. At least MS Office works. Most of the time. If I had ever tried to keep track of the number of hours wasted screwing around with Blackboard, by now I would have lost track. To say nothing of having lost my mind.

Yesterday I worked about three hours on blogging—starting at three in the morning, wrote and fiddled around until about 6:00 a.m. This work earned about $9 an hour. The day before yesterday, the site earned $.02. I wrote two posts that day; neither was very long, but taken together they probably took an hour or more to write, edit, and revise. Yes. That’s a pay rate of, at best, two cents an hour. On average I’ve earned $2.25 an hour at blogging over the past two days.

I blog because I like to blog, not to earn a living. So you could say it’s all very nice to earn a bit of pocket change for what started out as a hobby. Still…I’m spending a lot of time on this for very little return.

Teaching, as spotty as it is, comes closer to providing a reliable income than anything other than Social Security. But by its nature, adjunct pay does not cover the bills. It’s irregular and unpredictable. But the worst part of it is, you spend many, many, many hours on the job for which you are flat not paid.

This summer the college kindly paid me a stipend for preparing an online course in magazine writing. The amount was the equivalent of pay for a three-credit course. That was very nice, but I didn’t get the full amount until after I had jumped through endless hoops, some of which were real time-wasters. With the exception of about two weeks in May, I worked almost full-time on this task through the entire summer. It should take about a week and a half of full-time work to do a semester’s course prep for something you haven’t taught recently. Although I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth—pay for course prep is largely unheard-of in academic circles—the fact is that because of the way the money was paid, it didn’t help me when I most needed it. Despite working very hard on a tedious job all summer long, I ended up with little to help me get through that long dry spell.

Because I sit in front of the computer from three, four, or five in the morning all the way through to eight or nine at night, I never get any exercise. Occasionally I walk the dog. I try to do that twice a day, but as a practical matter I’m doing well to get to it once a day. And during the summer it was way too hot to take her out during the daylight hours. In the mornings I was working–I would start on average around 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and not lift my head until 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., at which point I had to cope with the pool and the yard before it got impossibly hot. By the time that was done and the dog and I were fed, it was impossibly hot. By 10:00 p.m., when I would ordinarily quit working, I often was too tired to drag myself and the hound around the block.

We’re doing a little better now that the weather is cooler. But a stroll around the block does not make it as exercise! I need to get back on the mountain—or, since the city is going to start charging a stiff fee for the privilege of parking outside the public parks, over to a neighborhood at the base of Squaw Peak, where I can walk on hilly streets. The dog will have to stay home, because she can’t keep up with a fast walk of two or three miles.

That’s going to necessitate a major change in habits. Driving across town and spending an hour or 90 minutes charging around, then having to race home and wash the sweat off and fix breakfast will blow away my mornings.

Here are my proposed strategies:

1. Arrange a 3 percent drawdown from savings in an amount that, combined with Social Security, will cover base expenses twelve months a year. That one is already done.

2. Use teaching income solely to cover my share of the mortgage on the downtown house. This allows me to pay for that without having to incur still more taxes by drawing down an extra $9600 a year from my IRAs.

3. Glom onto any leftover teaching income for diddle-it-away change…and use it. Spend some money on concerts, day trips, and yea verily…even recreational shopping.

4. Also with this extra money (assuming there is any), run the air conditioner at a tolerable level next summer. I do not think I can bear the prospect of spending another 115-degree summer cooped up inside a miserably uncomfortable house.

5. Further simplify courses. Make all nonessential exercises ungraded in-class exercises. Reduce the number of papers that have to be read and graded to the three or four required assignments plus their drafts.

6. Quit sitting in front of the computer all day long. In fact, do not even turn it on before about 10:00 a.m.

7. Set MacMail to divert the vast amount of spam that pours in from the community college district by blacklisting offending addresses, thereby reducing the surprising amount of time consumed by deleting the endless irrelevant messages.

8. Find ways to reduce the amount of time spent at blogging, or to write several days’ posts at once.

That’s about it. Not having to worry quite so much about money should help a lot. But to that, I’ve got to add getting some exercise and building a more normal life.

Wee Hours Wandering

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It’s a quarter to two, there’s no one in the house…except Cassie and me. I’ve neglected visiting my blogging friends for so long, I’ve forgotten what they write about. So here’s a chance, in the wee hours, to do a little blog-hopping.

Frugal Scholar has been holding forth on any number of interesting issues. Yesterday she was riding my favorite hobby horse, Ol’ Income Inequality. Giddyap! La Maya glommed onto the same subject the other day, having recently come across the chart that shows how real income in the U.S. rose from about 1830 to 1970 and has been dropping ever since. More recently it seems to have dropped precipitously. While gut instinct tells me that we’re worse off now than we were under Bill Clinton (or hell…even under Ronald Reagan!), one needs to keep in mind that “real income” figures don’t necessarily take all the important metrics under consideration. For example, in 1830 (or even early 1970) workers didn’t routinely have their employers pay most or all of their health care insurance. Factors such as smaller household size, widespread two-earner households, the existence of passive income, and rising real consumption also come into play here.

Still at FS, take time to wonder at the real estate market, where Frugal trots out another of my pet hobbyhorses: foreign investors in distressed U.S. real estate. During the savings & loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same darn thing we’re seeing now happened: as Americans defaulted on loans and lenders sank beneath the waves, Canadians rushed into the Arizona real estate market, turning homes all over established middle-class neighborhoods into rentals. As absentee landlords, they didn’t give one thin damn about who they were renting to or what the renters were doing to the property. Forthwith we saw blight spread through once pleasant and safe central city districts. The minute the economy improved, middle-class homeowners fled to the new suburbs, created as developers bladed the Sonoran desert at the rate of an acre an hour to accommodate people who wanted nothing more than to get quit of their ratty new neighbors and to move into HOAs and gated communities, which they imagined would protect their investments in their homes.

On a lighter note, over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche solicits opinions on this cute little blouse she got at 50 percent off. Even at the mark-down, is it worth keeping? Revanche has discovered the benefits of investing in Vanguard’s Admiral Shares, where expense ratios are extravagantly low.

At Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman tries to cope with the anger she feels at the current vogue for open hatred. This is a long and thoughtful essay, well worth the read.

Over Forty and Loving It isn’t loving having to deal with punch-a-button mazes. Ugh. Just imagine being the poor wretch that you finally do reach, after ten or fifteen minutes of farting around in the phone tree. By the time I reach a person, I’m so furious it’s really hard to keep that angry edge out of my voice. I’ll bet those boiler room phone answering drones get sooooo much abuse from the public. What a way to earn your minimum wage!

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan has come across a strange critter: the conduit municipal bond. I’d never heard of this before. It certainly is an eyebrow-raiser.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability reports that she and Mr. A managed to beat back their credit-card debt by over $5000 in just six months. Awesome! Congratulations, Mrs. A!

Speaking of the good fight against debt and for financial health, J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly has a nice post on how to combat the frugalist doldrums. What do you do when you think you just can’t bear to look at another budget ever again?

Holy mackerel! Did you know kids could become victims of identity theft, too? Over at Free Money Finance, FMF advises on this issue and suggests several ways to protect  your kids.

Five-Cent Nickel is running an employment survey of his readers, asking what’s your job outlook. One of Nickel’s collaborators, Laura Martinez, does a good job of explaining auto title loans and their dangers.

At Brip Blap, Steve engaged the current “What’s in Your Wallet” meme the other day. He wraps up with an intriguing speculation about the future of wallets.

Simple Life in France, being preggers, visited a French dietition and ended up with a very interesting post on la différance between French and American viewpoints on what’s healthy.

And now, mes amies, daylight is breaking and I’m going back to bed.

Guercino, Aurora, Goddess of Dawn. Public domain.

Here’s something worth watching

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Have you seen Evan‘s new website enterprise? He’s experimenting with moving to other kinds of sites than blogging. It’s a baby pool, and it’s a hoot. Prospective parents can set up little minisites where friends and family can guess when and where Baby will be born, Baby’s weight, or Baby’s gender.

Evan’s description of what he had to do to get it up and running is interesting. It was quite a job. No handy-dandy WordPress template is out there for this sort of thing! Despite his considerable tech skills, he ended up having to hire a designer to make it work the way he wanted—at least one wanted as much as $10,000 to do the job! Read his post to learn how he found someone to help for a fee within his budget.

I hope Evan will keep us up to date on how this idea flies. I’ve also thought it might be worth looking in to other kinds of sites that could be monetized, though I’m not clever enough to come up with something like a baby pool. La Maya has started a site to display the paintings she’s willing to sell; she hopes to add new images regularly. It’ll be interesting to know whether the baby pool gets anywhere as an enterprise.

Back to the Future…

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{sigh} We have seen the future, and it is…the Dark Ages. The Party of No has wrested control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Party of the Half-Baked. No hope for relief from the metastasizing mean-mindedness and outright viciousness that have invaded our body politic is to be found, anywhere.

Here in Arizona, voters have approved a measure that exempts citizens and businesses from the national healthcare plan. The comically moronic Governor Jan Brewer (she of “uhhhhhh………..tee hee!……..uhhhhhmmmmmm”) was re-elected, of course, and the craven pol who presided as superintendent of public instruction while Arizona’s school system sank to the bottom of the national rankings is now, God help us, the state attorney general.

Now I’ll have to say, I wasn’t pleased with Obama’s healthcare plan. Without a national option, it’s just another iteration of what we already had: it threw us into the lion’s den with a pride of hungry insurance companies. We needed an option to make something like Medicare available to everyone who wished to accept it. Medicare is expensive — even after the state’s insurers raised their rates, my employee plan cost an eighth of what I’m paying to be fully covered under Medicare. However, for what I’m paying, coverage is better. If I fall ill and have to go doctors frequently, my overall costs will be much lower. Requiring everyone to sign up for full coverage with private insurers while blocking insurers from shafting people who really need care simply guaranteed that everybody’s costs would go up, coverage would be no better than what we have, and the well-heeled insurance industry would be joined by every other well-heeled industry in mounting a no-holds-barred campaign against the Obama administration.

Accepting compromise on healthcare was stupid. If the Democrats couldn’t swing a national healthcare option, then they should have dropped their plan until they could.

As for the Afghanistan mess: We were in Afghanistan long before Obama came along. Matter of fact, it seems to me we entered the war in the Middle East because a certain pack of lies emanated from a previous administration. Afghanistan was where the perp was hiding, but instead of going after him, we took it upon ourselves to depose a dictator who was formerly our ally, not because he was much of a threat but because, said our then-President, “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

So…now we have in office some folks who think it’s acceptable to stomp on the head of a woman who disagrees with their doctrine.

Time to get out our brown shirts and iron them. And if you still believe you’re in the middle class, say good-bye to all that.