Coffee heat rising

Fainting Dead Away in the Grocery Store

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Was that a hallucination? Did anyone else see it?

The other day at the Safeway I went to buy a couple of yellow onions. Bounced off the onion bin like it had a forcefield around it. They wanted 99 cents apiece!

A dollar for an onion? One ordinary yellow onion?

Really? Really????

So I walked around the bin to see if they had any smaller, punier numbers they might be trying to get rid of. Found one narrow shelf that at one time had these, which the Safeway was peddling for 49 cents apiece. All the half-dollar onions were gone but two, each of which was bruised and starting to rot.

I could not freaking believe it.

So left the Safeway onionless, figuring to pick up some onions at a more reasonable price at one of the ethnic markets. My schedule being what it is, though, of course I never made it to Lee Lee’s or El Rancho. The larder is empty of onion.

Maybe I should plant some in the back yard. Wonder if they’ll grow here in the winter?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Grumpy Old Lady’s Jaundiced View of Fools

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Here’s something remarkably stupid: The L.A. Times’s staff is caught on the horns of a dilemma—what on earth to do with the candy the kids collect in their annual door-to-door solicitation.

Dear me. If it matters to you that much, why let the kids go trick-or-treating at all? You’re not mom enough or dad enough to utter the dread word, No? You can’t think of anything else for the offspring to do that night? Throw a big kiddy party? Cook toxicly sugared candy at home and get dressed up in fright costumes and and answer the door and scare the neighbors’ kids and then dose the neighbors’ kids with the stuff?

We have here descriptions of helicopter parents actually counting the calories in pieces of Hallowe’en candy and making the kids trade out a bag of lunch chips for a piece of sugary junk. Junk food for junk food, as it were.

Is there a surer way to make your child more neurotic than your neurotic cat? Anorexia, anyone?

LOL! My mother had a pretty good way of dealing with the Hallowe’en candy conundrum, which no doubt crossed her fevered mind now and again: during the rest of the year, she simply didn’t deliver sweets on anything like a routine basis. We didn’t have desserts (allegedly my father didn’t like them; but after she was dead and gone and he was living in a life-care community, I noticed  he was given to taking two pieces of industrial pie from the chow line at dinnertime). I rarely ate candy. It wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a normal part of daily life. Result: I wasn’t especially interested in junk candy.

I did love to collect it at Hallowe’en. But by the time I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I was pretty picky about what I would stuff in my mouth. Most of it got thrown out—by me, not by my mother.

What part of common sense is hard to grasp here?

When M’hijito was little, all the women in our car-pool, who lived pretty much in the same neighborhood, would conspire to buy really high-quality candies or fruits and party favors, which would be dispensed only to the kids they recognized. Then they’d buy a bushel of the cheapest junk on the market to hand out to the hordes of children trucked and bussed in from the surrounding  blight. Cruel, but it kept our kids in halfway decent junk and kept the cost of servicing over a hundred trick-or-treat parties a night within reason.

Whether you have kids or not, the question does remain: what to do with unused and unusable junk candy inflicted by the Hallowe’en tradition. Whether your kid drags it home or you have to buy it to amuse someone else’s kids, what do you do with the leftover stuff?

Me, I avoid it altogether. Come Hallowe’en, Cassie and I go out on the town, walking through a part of this neighborhood where parents from the surrounding barrios descend with their little kids. It’s great fun: the kids are jumping up and down and all dressed up and cuter than cute. The neighbors, who encourage the invasion for that very reason, all drag folding tables into their spookily decorated front yards and sit around socializing. We can easily wait out the onslaught by hanging out to watch the show, so that by the time we get home, alas, no more kiddies are coming to our door.

I used to buy wrapped candies to hand out. Most parents around here won’t let their kids eat anything that’s not individually wrapped in the manufacturer’s branded plastic. You’d be crazy to do otherwise, really. But that means old home-made favorites like popcorn balls and caramel apples are out (and kids never come to know those wonderful treats). And if you don’t eat the stuff yourself, as I don’t, and not enough kids come around to collect all the junk, then what do you do with the stuff?

At one point I thought, well, take it over to Goodwill or down to the food bank and donate it. But…uh…no. They don’t want it, either. They have ethical compunctions, as anyone with any decency should, about giving sugary crap foodoid to hungry children.

So, donating it is out. Throwing it away is a lot like throwing money in the garbage, because even the cheapest of the stuff is not really cheap. I resent being pressured into buying stuff I would never eat myself and that I think is unhealthy for children and that half the time I end up throwing away. So I just don’t buy it at all: I leave the house for the evening.

What do you do with unwanted or undesirable Hallowe’en treats?

 

w00t! Am I gonna get a RAISE?

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So despite our getting a slight cost-of-living increase in Social Security, we’re told that Medicare premiums will go up much less than expected. Most of the news reports natter on about how the new premiums will rise to $99.90. That of course causes me to go “huh?” because my premiums are already $111 a month.

But lo! Here at the Washington Post we learn that those who pay more will see their Medicare premiums drop to $99.90.

Can that be? It’s a miracle, if it’s so! If it’s true, then I should see about a $40 or $45 increase in net government dole for 2012.

That will just about cover the increase in property taxes. Significant, because I couldn’t afford said increase.

Well. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile, another small miracle: the American Express bill arrived this evening. And hallelujah, I indeed did manage to stay UNDER BUDGET last month. Not by much—about fifty bucks. But fifty bucks is fifty bucks. That much more to spend this month.

$🙂$

Stress-Free Finances: Cultivate Minimalism

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As we’ll see in this series, the key to stress-free finances is to live not within your means but under your means. Your goal is to live comfortably on less than you earn. Preferably, on lots less. If you’re bringing home, say, $3,000 a month, you would like to live on $2,000 or, at most, $2,500.

It’s not very difficult. The strategy is to determine what you really need and what you want, and then pare back the junk and the services to a level that’s as close as you can get to the need level, within reason.

I say “within reason” because I don’t believe it’s necessary to live like an anchorite to stabilize your finances and keep financial worries under control. Nor do we have to live like robber barons to be comfortable. What we’re looking for is a happy medium. To find that, you quietly engineer your expenses so that your cost of living is significantly less than your income, and then keep those costs as steady as possible—or even cut them—as your income rises.

The surest way to cut regular, unavoidable costs is to pay off debt and then, once free of it, to stay out of debt by never charging more than you have coming in during a specific period. At first, this strategy may require you to increase outgo, as you pay more than the minimum toward charge cards, student loans, and auto payments. But keep the faith: obviously after a time you’ll get this albatross off your neck, and then the amount you were paying toward it will no longer be going out the door. You have better things to do with this money; namely, saving it for a rainy day, for the kids’ education, and for your own retirement.

The second, surprisingly effective strategy is to pursue a minimalist lifestyle. Look around you: how much sheer junk do you own? Do you collect doodads that have their own collection—of dust? Does your closet shelter clothing that you haven’t worn in a year or more? Are the shelves groaning under decorator items waiting for you to dust them? Got an extra phone, computer, television, pair of skis that you really didn’t need in the first place? Subscribing to 110 premium cable channels when in fact you mostly watch only a dozen, or mostly rent movies? How many times this year did you use that boat in the side yard?

Declutter

Exercise Number One: lighten your load! Declutter the house and the yard. If you’re not using something, if it decoratively collects dust, or if serves no urgent purpose, get rid of it. Yard-sale it, Craig’s-List it, e-Bay it, donate it, recycle it!

As a first step, this process makes you feel amazingly liberated. Just getting rid of the junk makes your home look bigger and brighter, frees you of a bunch of stuff to take care of, and leaves you feeling about ten pounds lighter. Speaking of your home…

Right-size Your Home

If you’ve not locked yourself into an underwater mortgage, consider this fact: A house or apartment should suffice to fill your needs and only your needs. No extra rooms are needed. No empty basements need apply. All you need is enough space for you and your family to occupy.If you’re buying, try to avoid spending on more square feet than you need. With real estate still running upwards of $90 a square foot, one extra 10 x 10 “sun room,” “hobby room,” or “guest bedroom”can cost you $9,000. Or more. Plus tax. Plus insurance.

Houses that fit are back in style, and they were coming back long before the recession hit. Take a look at Sara Susanka and Kira Obolensky’s books on the not-so-big house for some ideas on how inviting and comfortable a human-sized dwelling can look. And if bungalow size is larger than you need, Little House on a Small Planet, by Shay Solomon, Nigel Valdez, and Frances Moore Lappe, will inspire a wealth of ideas about how to build your financial and spiritual wealth by living in the right space.

Rent, Don’t Buy

Consider renting instead of buying, at least until you can save up more than 20% of a house’s purchase price. By now most of us have come to understand that all the persuasive palaver to the effect that renting is pouring money down the drain and the mortgage deduction offers us all some vast tax advantage is just so much hooey. Too many Americans watched their money flow down the drain, all right—after they purchased homes guaranteed to increase in value with mortgages costing far more than they could afford when they lost their jobs.

Renting has several sterling advantages:

First, most of the time you’re not responsible for repairs. New homebuyers are often shocked to learn how much homeownership actually costs, once all those trips to Home Depot are factored in. Roof repairs, plumbing repairs, mold abatement, dead tree removal: yike! Let the landlord pay for it—he can take it as a tax deduction.

Second, renting gives you mobility. Consider the number of people who can’t pursue job offers in other cities because they’re locked into mortgages for more than their homes are worth. Renters can move pretty much any time they please.

And third, because a renter saves money on maintenance bills, your overall shelter costs are lower than a homeowner’s. Stash the savings in an investment account.

Select a Safe but Not Extravagant Neighborhood

Look for homes on the outer fringes of upscale areas. Often residents share the better schools of their more affluent neighbors but not the prices of the larger, gaudier homes. Before renting or buying, check the local crime reports. Google “Crime Reports” plus your city or state, or try CrimeReports.com.

Keep Transportation Costs within Reason

If you’re a couple, possibly you can get by with just one car. One person might car-pool to work, or one might drop off and pick up the other during the morning and evening commutes. By all means, if you’re lucky enough to live in a city with decent public transit, use it!

But if the adults in the house each really need a car, why buy new? Excellent late-model vehicles can be had at very reasonable costs—let someone else pay for that outlandish first-year depreciation. Once you’ve driven a new car off the lot, it’s an instant used car, anyway. Insurance and registration costs are lower on older cars, making them a much better buy for anyone even faintly interested in building wealth.

In considering the cost of a place to live, keep in mind the cost of commuting. Gasoline, upkeep, and wear and tear on a vehicle are real costs to living in the suburbs. One Lifehacker writer reckons that over ten years, a 40-minute commute—considered by many to be within reason—will set the driver back $125,000. You can figure it out for yourself with this handy calculator. Though a more centrally located home may cost more than a stick-and-styrofoam number halfway to the Timbuktu, the expense of commuting may outweigh the higher rent or mortgage. And the savings in time and stress provided by a shorter commute are huge.

Note, too, that a car for a teenager is really not a need. Let the kids wait until they can afford the payments and the insurance (to say nothing of the speeding tickets) before they take off on wheels.

Dress Modestly

Where does it say you have to wear Ralph Lauren or Banana Republic to work? Attractive, generic clothing is to be found at Penney’s, Target, even Costco. If you’ll feel just too, too humiliated appearing in public in anything less than Armani, try shopping in upscale thrift shops. I just found my second St. John outfit at My Sister’s Closet. Looks like it was made for me! The store is awash in designer labels for men as well as women, ranging from professional attire to dressy and casual.

Select Friends Who Live Modestly

High-living peers exert an outrageous amount of pressure on us to spend more than we need: eating out, shopping at unnecessarily expensive stores, traveling to places we don’t need to go, driving expensive cars we don’t need to drive.

I used to hang out with a woman who had a million-dollar appetite. Even though her present husband was a mid-level bureaucrat, she still lived as though she were married to the one who owned the thoroughbred ranch in Kentucky—yeah, the place where she once entertained Queen Elizabeth II. This lady liked company as she made the rounds of Saks and the various boutiques she favored. Just being with her in a store virtually guaranteed that I would buy a new Eileen Fisher or some such…even as I knew very well that 99.9% of the places I went did not require me to surface in a designer costume. I exaggerate not: after a couple of these shopping junkets, I developed the habit of returning everything I bought a day or two later!

Today I prefer the company of people with more common sense.

Eat Great Food—at Home

Cooking is not very hard. Neither is shopping for food. Even if your idea of a home-cooked dinner is something that comes out of a microwave, dining at home is many, many times more economical than eating out. And nine times out of ten, you can prepare a meal that’s far superior to what you can get in any but the most expensive restaurants.

Last night I had prime sirloin tips (purchased at Costco at a dollar less per pound than the choice ribeyes), scalloped potatoes, glorious corn on the cob, a glass of very palatable wine, and a bowl of fresh strawberries. The whole meal cost about what one glass of Cabernet would have run at the sort of place that serves prime beef sautéed in butter. You understand…I eat like that every night. And I live on less than 30 grand a year.

Resist Filling Your Life with Junk

Who doesn’t need this…and this…and this…?

Imagine having to take care of it all!

And imagine the cost, over time, involved in collecting all that junk. He who restrains himself wins the jackpot.

Do It Yourself

Some of us are handier than others. But most people can drive a nail or turn a screwdriver. Changing the oil in your car is not nuclear physics. Neither is sewing flat-panel curtains or replacing a toilet handle. Try to learn how to do at least some of the things around the house. The savings can be significant.

Sometimes, too, one discovers the truth of the old saw that if you want something done right, you should do it yourself. When I was employed, I could afford cleaning ladies. Occasionally I would hire them. One wrecked a parquet floor by applying undiluted Murphy’s Oil Soap with a janitorial dustmop. Another pair created several weekends of hands-and-knees work for me when they smeared undiluted Simple Green all over 1860 square feet of tile, thinking they were mopping. Gerardo the Yard Dude, who handles physical work I can no longer do, has a sidekick who breaks parts of the irrigation system and then, to stay out of trouble, hides the parts so that I don’t find out about it until some plant dies.

The frugal life is a lot less stressful than the heedless one. You end up with less real estate to clean and maintain, less junk to find places for and keep clean, better food, nicer clothing, cheaper wheels, fewer messes created by other people, less debt, and more money.

And as they say…money isn’t everything, but it sure beats whatever’s in second place.

Urban Hallowe’en Tales: The Night of the Screaming

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Okay, so Stephen says he’ll kick in the price of a cup of coffee if I’ll tell the stories of the Night of the Screaming and the Burglar Who Is Still Running. You know, Stephen, the price of one fancy Starbucks concoction will keep the old lady in premium espresso coffee beans for almost a month…

Ah, yes. The Night of the Screaming.

There was a reason I was a trophy wife. When I was young and nubile, I was…well…damned spectacular. Men would stop their cars in the street to watch me walk by. The occasional lively young gent, emboldened by a rush of testosterone, would even try to get me into his car. It was like that.

On this particular evening, I was still young and lush. My then-husband was a partner in one of the two top law firms in the American Southwest. This august institution had regularly recurring firm meetings, at which all the partners and associates were required to show up. Poor fellows (and in those days, that’s what they were: fellows) forced themselves to gag down a filet mignon with béarnaise sauce and several glasses of wine, preceded by a bit of whiskey, down at the Arizona Club. Afterward, they talked business into the night. He usually got home between 11:00 p.m. and midnight.

I’d fed our three cats, fixed and consumed my dinner, done a set of tummy-tightening and boob-lifting exercises in the living room, and started the dishwasher. Then I set the hated Smith-Corona portable typewriter on the floor in front of the television (this was before the days of the PC) and got to work writing a graduate-school seminar paper that was due the following morning.

So there I am, typing away.

The old Kitchenaid works wonderfully but it’s no Bosch: silence is not its thing. It’s plinking and plonking busily in the background, and I’m mostly ignoring it.

I hear a rustling sound in the service porch between the TV room and the kitchen. Two catboxes are in there, serving as a latrine for the feline livestock. This noise, I register as the cats scratching in litter. It stops, confirming my impression.

I type. I throw out another sheet of paper when the hated Smith-Corona lets it slip loose from the platen on the last line of the page, causing that last lightning-typed line to skew down through the bottom margin and off the page. Pick up another sheet, roll it into the platen, hear more scritching in the service porch.

Insistent scritching.

What ARE those cats doing in there? think I.

I get up off the floor to go see what the hell the cats are doing in the service porch and find…no cats.

No cats anywhere around. Puzzled, I take a closer look and find…

The latch on the door handle wiggling up and down.

Door handle latches do not wiggle themselves. Even I am bright enough to figure that one out.

I run to the front of the house, look out through the French doors into the screened entry atrium, determine no one is out there, throw open the front door, and holler, at the top of my lungs,

F-I-R-E!!

F-I-R-E!!!!

HELP! MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!!

FIRE!!!!

FIRE!!!!!!!!

CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!!!!

Well, naturally, all the neighbors come trotting out of their houses, cocktails in hand, to watch my house burn down.

I’d always been told that you should never yell HELP! RAPE! BURGLAR! Because no one wants to get mixed up with a rapist or a burglar. What I didn’t know was

how freakin’ LOUD a woman really can yell.

I had no idea I could make a noise like that.

It worked. Some of the neighbors saw the perp. He’d parked his bike next to the side entry to our service porch, and when the circus began, he jumped aboard and shot off down the alley.

The guy had almost managed to jiggle the dead-bolt open—it was about 1/4 of the way thrown. Another few minutes and he would have been in the house, helping himself to the lawyer’s dish.

So there it is: the moral of the story is “never yell ‘help.’ Always yell FIRE!” No matter what, no matter where. Oh. And never do your exercises in the living room, where anyone loitering in your side yard can see in through the windows that open only to the oleanders.

Tune in on October 31 for The Burglar Who Is Still Running

Lives of the Self-Employed

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“Self-Employed”: that’s another way of saying “underemployed,” which ultimately is another way of saying “unemployed.”

It happened again last night: I worked until 11:30 trying to keep up with a set of jobs that pay poverty wages. This is just flicking INSANE!

Over the weekend it occurred to me, once again, that I need to get a grip on the way I spend my time. Too sick to go to choir, on Sunday I was struggling to get even with the 101 papers so they’d be off my desk, to the extent they ever are, by the time the 235 students’ first real assignment came in. But I realized the house was so filthy it was actually making the dog sick: Cassie’s eyes water all the time because she’s allergic to something, probably all the dust on the floors. Her little nose is only about 10 or 12 inches off the ground, so naturally when she goes tearing around on floors that haven’t been properly cleaned in three months, the dust flies up into her face.

So I finally decided I would have to let the student papers go for a day in favor of basic sanitation.

But not before I tried to sketch out some sort of schedule that might get the massive amounts of work under control. Caring for the house, the dogs, and the yard alone could fill one’s day; add trying to run three exercises in underemployment and you’re doomed.

This, to my astonishment, is the result:

Lives of the Self-Employed
You'll need to click on the image here; it's so large it won't fit in a column.

The plan was to try to keep the actual paid work hours down to 40 a week, and also to work in time to walk Cassie and to take Charley to the park for a leash-training session. Also, I wanted to get back into the habit of bathing and painting my face early in the day, instead of having to race through those jobs in the 15 minutes before I have to run out the door to class.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I don’ t have to leave for campus until almost 11:00 a.m. However, if I do the other things I need to do—walk the dogs, make the bed, pick up the pigpen (which while the weather is warm—we’re just coming off another three-digit spell—entails tending the pool and watering plants), fix and eat breakfast, take a shower, paint my face, and get dressed for class—this schedule still leaves me working into the middle of the night.

Every flickin’ night.

Seven days a week.

Out of curiosity, I added up the number of hours for which I actually get paid, which I’ve called “productive hours.” All that teaching and editing and blogging adds up, during a well-organized week with no rush jobs, to sixty hours a week!

Know what I earn for a sixty-hour work week? $29,790.

Yes. Less than half of what I earned when I had a real job, at which I worked about 30 or 35 hours a week.

All it takes is one thing to disrupt this finely juggled schedule. Today, for example, I have to go to the dentist at 10. That cuts short the time for writing this blog post—Charley’s half-hour training session will have to go—and pushes the other work forward until after I get back, sometime around noon.

Gerardo just showed up. The disruption he and his sidekick create distracts from trying to get the present chore (blogging) done. Just spent 20 minutes cleaning up the dog shit I didn’t get to yesterday because it was well after dark before my son picked up his dog, and instructing Gerardo on the plants that need to be pulled out because they died during the summer’s heat.

And I have to be back here by noon so I can sit here for five hours waiting for the pool guy to come back and fix the filter AGAIN.

Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars. The dentist is going to clean out my checking and savings accounts today. There’s been NO WAY I’ve been able to set aside another $40 a month for routine dental work. Not only have I not been able to self-escrow enough to cover tooth-cleaning (to say nothing of the new interesting thing that’s developed), I’ve been dipping into savings every month to cover ordinary expenses.

Leslie’s said they might forgive the cost of today’s service call, because it’s not been very long since the guy was last here. But if they don’t, that’ll be at least another $160.

Next month I have to drain and refill the pool: $200.

The $185/month water bills this summer happened after I’d turned off the water on the front east side. I’d forgotten that last winter I figured all that xeric landscaping needn’t be watered and had pledged to manually water the roses and hollyhocks three times a week. Well of course while struggling to keep afloat in the tsunami of work that was last summer, I forgot that best-laid plan. So two of the roses in front are dead; the hollyhocks are seared back to the ground, the yellow oleander just barely recovered from last winter’s freezes and has a lot of deadwood that needs to be cut out.

I’ll have to pay Gerardo extra for all the extra work he and his slavey are doing.

The work tsunami hasn’t subsided. I guess I must have washed out to sea.

Speaking of the which, I must hurry to get some food before the kid shows up here with that dog. Bye!

By the way: that 59.6 hours a week? That’s just the paid work. As for the “nonproductive hours”—the hours of work around this place that are NOT paid: 49.65 hours a week.