Coffee heat rising

Another Day, Another Job Hunt

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Finished reading student papers and applied for another job yesterday. Ugh. Writing a cover letter and tweaking the CV took over half the day—longer than chugging through the student papers.

The community college where I’m working has finally advertised a full-time position in its English department. The ad reads like it was written for me…everything they want, I can give them. Except they probably don’t have in mind hiring someone who’s already on Medicare.

It’s pretty hopeless, isn’t it? Even though my old age puts me in a federally protected class (did you know you’re part of said protected class if you’re over forty?), all that means is that a prospective employer has to come up with some other excuse for not hiring you. The person they hired most recently is no spring chicken, but she’s sure not eligible to draw Social Security!

Really, it’s reasonable that they would prefer not to hire an old lady. The hiring process for these jobs, which are real plums, is long and arduous. No one likes to go through a search, and so they quite understandably would like to get someone who’s going to stay put, not someone who’s past retirement age. I think most of the District’s full-time faculty were probably hired in their thirties and can be expected to stay in the job for a good thirty years.

The other job I’ve applied for is at a place where they do indeed hire older people. A friend who’s living in Sun City recently got hired there. Though the pay is much less—just 30 grand—it would keep the wolf from the door for awhile, and it’s a very pleasant place to work. From the employer’s point of view, though, it’s not immediately evident that I’m qualified to do it. About a third of the job entails bookkeeping and financial oversight. While I know I can do it—I’ve been keeping my business’s books for years, and I also tracked our expenses and made the purchasing and hiring decisions at GDU’s editorial office—it’s hard to make that kind of activity obvious on your resumé, especially when the resumé is heavy on teaching and editorial experience.

Well…obviously I’m not going to be on a job for 30 years. I’m not going to live anywhere near that long. But if my health holds and I don’t lose my marbles, I’d probably be good for ten or fifteen more years. At the time the Bush economy crashed, I planned to work until I was 70, by which time M’hijito would be in a decent job and we would unload the downtown house. Getting laid off at 64 blew a hole in my retirement plans, and the crash wrecked M’hijito’s hopes of finding a better job while it trashed our little real estate investment. So…the truth is I have to work, and if I could get someone to hire me I’d need to stay in the traces until at least age 75.

Beyond 75, one enters advanced old age, and it’s unlikely anyone older than that is going to be good for much.

LOL! I do like to daydream sometimes about what I would do if I got a real job.

If a miracle happened and I landed the handsomely paid teaching job (we are talking “miracle” here), the first thing I’d do is sell this house and get myself into something that requires much, much less upkeep.

Sooner or later I’m going to have to move, and really…I’d like to get out of here before I’m forced. It would be best to have some choice about which rocks one lands on.

{sigh} Job or no job, I need to find an easier, cheaper place to live before much more time passes. Filling in the pool is not a practical idea. That would cost as much as building a new pool, and the result would damage what little value remains in this property. What’s needed is a nice updated patio home on a single floor with wide doorways into the bathrooms. Without a job, moving is just going to gouge another chunk out of my retirement savings. With a job, I could swing it with no further mortal damage.

’Tother thing I’d do, if a miracle happened and someone went so far as to hire me into a decently paying job, is get a new car. The Dog Chariot has developed an interesting squeak. The mechanic, being male, being almost as elderly as I, and having spent his life in around high-decibel machinery, couldn’t hear it. But I sure can…sounds like something inside a wheel. If I had an income, I’d get a car now that would run until I can no longer drive—about 15 more years.

But again, with no job, I can’t afford that. Couldn’t even begin to afford the higher insurance premiums, nor could I pay the annual registration on a newer car. I’ll have to run the Chariot until it falls apart, and then let whatever happens next take care of itself.

The lower-paying job wouldn’t allow me to move or get a new car, but at least it would stanch the flow of blood from my retirement savings. That money really needs to be preserved until I’m truly too decrepit to work at all. Otherwise, it’s not going to last for the rest of my life. The teaching job would let me do both and contribute about $20,000 a year (more, maybe) to savings. Just a few years of that, and I’d be OK for the rest of the downhill ski run.

Welp, speaking of work, today is Wednesday from Hell. Fortunately, it’s not quite so hellish as usual, because the Thanksgiving holiday bumped choir practice back to Tuesday. But it’s still a full day of standing on my feet haranguing the few students who are likely to show up. Plus (speaking of bookkeeping) I need to spend some time updating Quickbooks. So…onward and downward.

 

The REAL Handyman’s Secret Weapon

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It’s not duct tape. But it may be something you have around the house…or more likely, out in the garage. Just the other day I had use for it.

Saturday morning when I went to pour the water off the olives I’m curing, I carelessly refilled one jar with hot instead of cold tap water. That seemed undesirable…the olives should soak in cold water. Too lazy to snap the handy plastic lid back on, I poured the water out through my fingers…and of course, the wet glass slipped right through my hands, crashed into the sink, and exploded into a mass of razor-sharp glass and olives (with pits!), all of which came to rest at the opening to the garbage disposal.

Yes.

A great wad of busted-up glass and olive pits, poised to drop direct into the garbage disposal.

Well, after picking out the glass shards and rescuing as  many olives as I could (and cutting the hell out of my fingers), what I had was a bunch of broken glass and olives (with pits!) down inside the garbage disposal. Put on some disposable gloves and fished out as many as I could, cutting myself only once more.

{sigh}

Dialed the plumber. This was adding up to a new garbage disposal. I could feel it in my bones.

Got the plumber on his cell phone. “Want me to turn the unit on and see what happens?”

Well, no. “Uhmm,…” said he, “do you have a shop vac?”

“Yeah.” (Doesn’t everyone?)

“Good. Turn it to wet-vac, stick the hose down the drain, and try to vacuum everything out of it. Then fill up the sink and try to rinse whatever’s left down.”

Okay.

Got off the phone. Emptied the dirt out of the shop-vac, still there from whatever the last adventure was. Put the thing back together. Plugged her in, shoved the hose end into the garbage disposal, and turned her on!

She howled and she clicked and she clattered and she jingled as the glass and olives and whatnot flew out of the plumbing. Didn’t take long before the rattle of debris passed and it sounded like nothing else was coming out.

Disengaged the vacuum cleaner. Filled a bucket half-full of water and poured it into the sink while the accursed water-saving tap was running at its excuse for full-bore. This put enough water into the sink to flow down the drain with some force.

And turned on the garbage disposal switch.

Mirabilis! It WORKED!

Nothing banged, nothing clanked, nothing rattled…and the garbage disposal did not jam! Saved!

There you go: the real handyman’s secret weapon. The shop-vac. Worth its weight in plumber’s tools.

Image: Nynexman4464. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

 

Bounty!

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The other day Costco was selling fresh turkeys for 89 cents a pound. Turkeys with no weird chemicals injected into them! Personally, I deeply dislike “Butterball” turkeys, which have been infused with fluids deemed to taste “buttery” and to keep the bloated bird nice and juicy while it spends untold hours in your oven as you try to cook 20 pounds of meat. Flavorless is bad enough; fake flavor surpasses bad enough.

Anyway, no weird gunk in them and under a buck a pound! Hallelujuah: just what Cassie the Corgi needs to feed her for the next three months!

So I grabbed a 20-pounder, and Thursday it went into the oven to roast slowly, unstuffed, at 325 degrees, for five hours. After La Maya and I returned from an outing, I hauled it out. Beat back the pup, who was driven mad by the aroma and a larger pile of food than he ever thought could possibly exist in one place. Because onions are poisonous to dogs, I’d cut up a big onion (also purchased at Costco for considerably less than the buck apiece Safeway is now charging) and put it under the bird, which I set on a rack over a roasting pan. Planned to  make an onion-flavored gravy to pour over whatever part of the meat I chose to eat myself, hoping to make it taste like something.

Unlike last year’s fiasco, this turkey did not exude something over a quart of water. The pan contained mostly actual pan drippings, which cooked into a nice gravy when some wine and flour were added.

The meat…meh! It came out of the oven moist and nicely cooked. It didn’t taste as bad as last year’s turkey dog-meat experiment, but it still had some of that unpleasant chemically flavor that seems to permeate all modern turkeys. Guess that’s just what you get from factory-farmed birds.

Anyway, it’ll do to feed the dog, and since I can no longer afford beef, I’ll have to eat some of it, too, like it or not.

And what an enormous amount of meat! Two plates laden with it, plus a gigantic carcass with which to make enough turkey stock to last a year.

We ended up with enough turkey to fill six large Ziplock bags and two plastic refrigerator containers. This will last Cassie for a long time. It definitely will carry her through the holidays, when I invariably run out of dog meat the evening before Christmas or New Year’s. Supplemented with an occasional purchase of chicken or pork, which can still sometimes be found at an affordable price, it should keep the little dog in business for quite a while.

 

 

Stress-free Finances: What Do You Want?

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What do you want, financially? What should you want? Me, I know what I don’t want: I don’t especially want to be rich. I’m content to live in modest comfort, with no debt obligations to anyone.

Owning more money and possessions than I need doesn’t interest me, though I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more cash in savings now than I estimate it will take to carry me through to the end of life.

Obviously, this is a subjective thing: each of us needs to weigh what really matters in our lives and decide what will make us content. Our friend Evan, for example, premises his excellent blog on his goal of reaching multimillionaire status. Yet we see that as he celebrates his thirtieth birthday, he reflects on treasures that have nothing to do with money.

There’s a difference between contentment and happiness. Would I be happy if someone gave me a million bucks? Well, sure: I’d be tickled. Would I like to have a Jaguar and a cute little BMW roadster sitting in the garage? I suppose. (Ever had to take care of a Jag or a BMW? You need an apartment over the garage for the live-in mechanic).

But would those things make my life better? I doubt it. How would a fancy car that requires constant upkeep improve on an eleven-year-old Toyota that after 106,000 miles still runs like a top and gets me where I need to go with minimal maintenance? Would a million dollars buy peace, or just give me something else to worry about?

Contentment is being at peace with one’s surroundings. It’s a long-term thing, whereas happiness is a short-term thrill.

What I want is to reach a state of serendipity. By that I mean I wish to reconcile what makes me content with the demands of the culture around me. To the largest extent possible, I would like to be free of those demands, or at least to be able to pick and choose the demands worth complying with. I can do without being badgered to pay bills, to pay taxes, to drive through homicidal traffic every day to show up at a miserable job, to care for a lot of unnecessary junk, to respond to this and that and the other requirement imposed by someone else.

While having some money helps to achieve that goal, having a lot of it is irrelevant. At some point, it’s not money that matters; it’s attitude.

To my mind, one crucial way to spring free of societal demands is to get free of debt. All debt.

Another is to reduce your psychological and social dependence on the possession of things. If debt is slavery, stuff is the slave-master.

“We got more places than we got stuff. We’re gonna have to buy MORE STUFF!” The other day  a friend who’s a mortgage broker spoke of some incredible bargain a client landed when he bought a 12,000-square-foot house in the present depressed real estate market. Think of the amount of STUFF that lucky purchaser will have to acquire!

The time wasted chasing down the stuff.

The energy wasted cleaning and maintaining the stuff.

The landfill space wasted when the stuff wears out.

Of course, if you can afford a 12,000-square-foot hovel, you can spare some of that square footage for the Jaguar mechanic who lives over the garage. And you can afford a staff of house cleaners to dust and polish your stuff.

Now you have to hire, pay, remit taxes for, and supervise those people. And you get to deal with the mountains of paperwork, workplace rules, and taxation the come the way of every employer in this country. If stress is your pleasure, now you’re in paradise: there’s nothing like management and HR tasks to add stress to your life.

How much more peaceful to own only what you really need: to have just enough around you to fit a human-sized life.

To my mind, money is another form of stuff. It’s something that has to be acquired, stored somewhere (not under the bed but in arcane spaces like the stock market, bonds, real estate, and bank accounts), and managed. It has to be dusted off, cleaned, and put back away—often by paid agents with whom, like household staff, you have to deal in ways that consume time, attention, and energy.

It’s not that we don’t need money, nor that we don’t need a little stuff. Obviously, we need a roof over our heads, a table to eat dinner at, and some pots and pans to cook in. My point is that none of us needs more than enough provide a comfortable home just large enough to house us, a healthy diet, adequate transportation, and the tools to educate ourselves and stay in touch with the people around us.

That amounts to a great deal less than a pile of junk sufficient to fill 12,000 square feet. Or even, for most families, 3,000 square feet. Or 2,000 square feet. Stuff may make us happy, but that’s temporary. Contentment is permanent, because it’s based on the things that matter.

The things that matter are, by and large, free: a growing child, a bouncing puppy,  a good friend, a beautiful day, a lovely sunset. And freedom from stress.

What, really, do you want?

The Problem with Working in the Cloud…

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…is that you need a functioning Stratoliner.

The plane, not the bike. Though a bike would be fun…

Last night I was determined to get through the most difficult of the magazine-writing students’ papers. By this time in a semester, you know who is going to turn in a tangle that will take you a good hour to crawl through. Two of those were sitting on the server, plus two others that will probably be OK. And yea verily, the first one I downloaded filled a half-hour of some mindless drivel on CBS that I turned on to provide background noise to keep me awake, and then it filled all of History Detectives. At 10:00 p.m. when I went to enter the grade, Google Docs would not respond.

Neither would anything else. I was offline. Couldn’t download the second difficult paper, and that left me unable to finish the work I’d laid out to do last night.

{sigh} So, this morning, with whatever was ailing Cox resolved, I still have three more papers to read, one of them something that will take forever to critique.

Honest to god, this is not the way I want to start the day. It’s six o’clock in the morning and I just can’t bring myself to read the thing closely. I have until 7:45, when Charley shows up, to get through this stuff in anything like a more or less uninterrupted way—after that, life is a kaleidoscope.

In that hour and 45 minutes, though, Cassie has to be fed and I need to get something to eat, since I hate being rushed and buffeted around during breakfast even more than I hate having to read student copy before dawn cracks. And the pool needs to be tended to. Again. That’s about 45 minutes or an hour of work.

Today is Wednesday from Hell, so these papers have to be read before 10:30 a.m. Either that, or I pick up the stuff around 9:30 and read until 11:00 p.m. Again. Assuming Cox stays up that late.

We finally landed a contract (well, in theory: I’ll believe it when I see it) from our would-be client in D.C. Pay is not great: to earn our target of $60 an hour, we’ll have to read 20 pages an hour. Speaking of needing a Stratoliner…

Anyway, we’re told this will happen in December. That’s good. Though I desperately need a break (is there a way of expressing how tired I am???), I’ve been sitting here wondering how on earth I’m going to get through December with no income. Eight months of pay is now no longer enough for me to live on.

If I don’t get a job soon or we don’t get credible, steady work through the editorial service, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Well, it’s not getting any earlier. So I’d better start reading this damn thing.

 

Today’s Holding Pattern

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Thanks to everyone who tested the audio file I loaded yesterday. Looks like the results are mixed, suggesting this won’t work for a class. And special thanks to Sam for the lead to the Audacity freeware. I’ll try that out.

Busy weekend but rather fun. After the Friday shindig, which I hope will be productive (still haven’t had time to call the people I met there—been in class or in front of the computer most of the day)—it was an active day in choir: the usual Sunday morning songfest, and then in the evening we revisited Fauré’s Requiem, a lengthy and interesting piece.

We’d sung it with the choir of St. Barnabas on the Desert for the anniversary of 9/11. Since it went over well, their choir came to our digs to reprise at an Evensong commemorating All Souls (and Veteran’s) Day. Well, the whole passel of singers professional and amateur just packed the choir loft. Sure was glad we’d already done it, since over the past month I missed three rehearsals because I was too sick to sing. But it all came back to me, thank goodness.

For reasons unknown to moi, we sang traditional spirituals during the morning service. They seem strange, after all the Latin, Renaissance, and 18th- and 19th-century music we usually sing. But some are quite lovely. The chamber choir, which consists solely of professional and near-professional singers, did a rendition of “There Is a Balm in Gilead” that was absolutely gorgeous. I just love to listen to these people sing…can’t think of anything more uplifting.

Would that any of them could do this, though:

Gosh.

Well, moving on. Worked from 7 till 11 this ayem; then out the door to meet the little McBoingers. After that, dropped by the Costco on the way home to buy a couple of chickens, a cost-effective way to feed me and Her Majesty Cassie, the Goddess of the Galaxy and Queen of the Universe.

While there, I discovered Costco is peddling unadulterated turkey for just 89 cents a pound.

w00t! That underprices and overqualities a certain Safeway supermarket of our acquaintance by several orders of magnitude. This weekend I dropped by there and was told prices would not come down off nearly $2 a pound for icky “flavor”-infused frozen birds. Price for the unadulterated “organic” carcasses was beyond my ability to register.

Costco’s cheapo turkeys are not organic, but according to their labels, neither are they soaked in saline solution or pumped full of fake “Butterball” fluids. So I grabbed a 20-pounder, which I intend to roast tomorrow (they’re not frozen!). This meat will feed me and the Queen of the Universe through the holidays, I think. Well: the Queen’s servant will get a meal off it. The rest of the meat will be removed, cut up or shredded, and frozen in packets to be available at Her Majesty’s behest.

This is good. Tonight Her Majesty and I will have some nice chicken (there’ll be enough that we could invite the human belonging to His Lordship, the Prince of the Universe, for dinner). And by tomorrow afternoon we’ll have a mountain of meat and a giant pile of bones with which to make glorious chicken/turkey stock. Yum!

We’re going to the the Prince’s human’s friends’ house for the annual Thanksgiving get-together. This will be fun…I do enjoy M’jihito’s friends and their various children, parents, and in-laws!

One of my favorite clients, a recent Ph.D. in psychology, just sent another of her endlessly entertaining case studies for edits. Ohhhh what a refreshing change from freshman comp papers! Now come, O lovely young woman, and get yourself a job that pays what you richly deserve, and then I can start charging you what I richly deserve.

🙂

Before sitting down to cope with the moment’s deluge of e-mail, baffled students’ petitions, contracts, and legal arcana, I go into the kitchen to pour a fine bourbon and water to accompany a bowl of cashews.

A large white head appears on the kitchen counter, accompanied by a pair of massive white paws.

Owner of massive head and paws

Hm. Uncivilized Prince of the Universe.

Human: Grasps PofU by the gigantic paws and swivels His Majesty away from the countertop. Gazes deep into the imponderable princely brown eyes.

Human: Off.

Prince: Gazes back, apparently either entranced or oblivious.

Human, placing gigantic paws on the floor: Off!

Prince: Assumes “sit” position, gazing up at human in awe and adoration.

Human, surprised: Yes! Good dog!

Whaaa? Is it possible that we got that? Or are we looking at yet another attempt by the PofU to train the human to his will?

Human and Royalty retire to office, Human bearing booze and cashew nuts. Queen acquires ripe chew stick, appropriately softened and made disgusting by several hours of chomping. Prince takes up position on Royal Mattress, gazing soulfully at Queen.

Prince: WHOOOOOAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

Human: Holy Gawd!!!!

Human studies Prince and notes him gazing soulfully at Queen. Human gets up, walks into other room, and hands over brand-new chew-stick to Prince, who returns to office bearing it as a prize.

Queen glares at Prince. Human resumes seat in front of computer. Prince resumes position on throne, chowing down on new chewstick.

Queen: GrrrrrrrrrRARF! RARF!

Queen charges Prince. No damage is done, because Queen is dwarfed by Prince and incapable of inflicting real harm. Probably. We hope.

Prince: Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! Warf! War…

Human: eNUFF ALREADY.

Human gets up and walks into kitchen, followed by Queen and Prince. Once there, Human persuades Prince to “Sit” and “Stay” long enough to retrieve cooked chickens from oven. Prince does not try to climb onto the 350-degree oven door. Miracles do happen.

Human and Royalty return to office. Queen takes up a position over the new chew-stick. Prince has misplaced the small, infinitely preferable ripened chewstick in the fray. He snags the large new one.

A “terrible fight” ensues, with Queen feinting fake bites and Prince WARFing joyously and vigorously. This goes on for 10 or 15 minutes. Finally Prince flops on the floor in a stupor, dropping chewstick under the human’s chair. Queen flops on the other side of the chair, emits an ostentatious growl, and goes to sleep.

And so, to work.

A Prince and His Chewstick