Life goes on in other parts of the world, even though the economy and 110-degree heat under cloudy skies have pretty much brought a stop to existence in these parts. Here and there, some interesting posts:
Evan, over at My Journey to Millions, celebrates his second blogiversary by celebrating the impending birth of his son with a lovely letter to the young fellow. Ah, to be in the fresh morning of life again…
Mrs. Accountability is still struggling with the aftermath of a computer meltdown, with data she thought had been backed up NOT, after all… Nightmarish. She just learned that when you order up a copy of your income tax returns, the IRS sends you a report that does not duplicate, by a long shot, all the data you enter in a 1040 and related forms. It costs $57 to get the real thing.
J.D. Roth has launched an interesting project: he’s going to relaunch an existing but dormant blog, Animal Intelligence, and at Get Rich Slowly he’s going to track and report upon the steps and progress he makes toward turning that site into a money-maker. He plans to donate the AI proceeds to charity. For sure, that’ll keep me coming around GRS, and I’ll also want to keep an eye on the critter blog.
Frugal Scholar figured out that some purchases made in thrift shops can be traded in at Buffalo Exchange. That’s kind of a neat insight…if you were clever enough about it, you could pick up treasures at Goodwill that don’t fit and schlep them to B.E. for credit toward purchases that do fit.
Speaking of prefab houses, as we were the other day, check out Little House in the Valley’s recent discovery! These houses are too kewl to be believed—though a bit on the pricey side, considering that you have to buy the lot and pay for services and contractors.
At Punch Debt in the Face, Ninja is about to say goodbye to bachelorhood! In celebration he’s posted a beautiful paean to Girl Ninja. Be sure to read some of the other posts near this one, also inspired by this great life change.
In the singleton department, Single Guy Money discusses the value of renter’s insurance and provides some tips to things to look for.
Money Beagle reports that his beloved former dwelling has been repossessed by the person who bought it. An anonymous commenter at this post makes some scary speculation about deflation. Conveniently, over at WiseBread, Phil holds forth on the subject with “All about Deflation.”
Welp, time to go on about some Saturday activities. More later…
The other day I was cruising some of those sites pluggingtiny houses and the occasional blog whose proprietor daydreamed wistfully of chucking all the junk and living in one of them. At some point in the course of this junket through the Internet—I don’t remember how—I stumbled upon this amazing site in the archives of Sears. Check it out, especially the voluminous collections of photos and floor plans.
As it develops, between 1908 and the start of World War II, Sears marketed houses built from kits. You could order up the plans and precut materials, and what you got was everything you needed to put a home together, right down to the nails, delivered to your site by freight train. Apparently it wasn’t hard to put one of the things together—a single skilled carpenter could do it.
These packages were made possible by the invention of drywall, which took the place of the much more work-intensive (and beautiful…) lath-and-plaster system, and enhanced by the invention of asphalt shingles, cheap to manufacture, easy to install, and fireproof. The prices today look astonishing. The Arlington (a.k.a. Modern Home No. 145), an elegant two-story model with indoor plumbing, cost $1,294 to $2,906.
Quite a few of the houses were bungalows. Meditating on these charming little structures, it occurred to me that some of them look suspiciously like my great-grandmother’s house in Berkeley. Could it be…?
Her house was built in 1922. Nothing like it appears in the 1921–1926 set, nor in the 1927–1932 collection. But in the last group of plans, 1933–1949, lo! What should appear but the Collingwood:
The exterior didn’t look at all like that. There was no dormer, the steps leading to the front door were different, and where the front porch is, my great-grandmother’s house had a small enclosed entry hall. But the floor plan is very similar, almost the same except for a couple of details:
The railroad-car layout is identical: the two bedrooms and bathroom stacked one behind the other on the right side of the house, and the living room opening through an archway into the dining room, which sat adjacent to the kitchen with its little eating nook at the far end and the back stoop off a little service porch. If the front porch were enclosed, the fireplace on the front wall instead of the side wall, and the living room and kitchen extended out as far as the “bay” in the dining room, it would the the same, identical floor plan!
The striking thing is how small this house is: only about 890 square feet. Some were much smaller; the Hathaway, for example, looks to have been about 410 square feet, when you add both floors together.
According to Zillow, my great-grandmother’s house, still standing on Hopkins Street in Berkeley and now valued at $733,500(!), has 1,265 square feet under roof. An average double-wide trailer is 1,700 square feet.
The house never seemed small to us: in fact, we regarded it as a normal sized home. My parents, in all their 38 years of wedded bliss, never lived in a house that had more than two bedrooms. People lived in larger houses, of course. But they were for larger families, people who had four, five, six kids. When my father moved them to a two-bedroom, two-bath house in Sun City, I recall my mother wondering why anyone would want a second bathroom to have to clean.
Today’s voguish “tiny” houses would have been cramped, even back in the day when people occupied lots less space. Tumbleweed is mounting 65- to 140-square-foot “tiny houses” on trailers. I couldn’t live in a 140-square-foot shed. But I would find many of the Sears floor plans quite comfortable. For one or two people, the Collingwood could certainly fill the bill.
Given the growing enthusiasm for small dwellings with small footprints, wouldn’t you think someone at Sears would think of reviving these kit houses?
Daddy passed for white. Mommy with her Huguenot ancestry and her DAR grandmother was as European as they come. So I reckon I can pass, too.
Last night my long-neglected White Trash roots sprouted a sucker: tinfoil window covering.
Beautiful! An exquisite decorator touch. Eat your heart out, Martha! And Sarah, y’all come on over for coffee now, hear?
How do you like it? Ain’t it purty?
Yep. Tinfoil and Scotch tape: Early Hillwilliam. Sooo…. What’s going on here?
What’s going on is I’m getting might’ tired of waking up at 4:30 in the morning after five hours (at best!) of sleep. Especially when I keep reading those studies that claim old bats who sleep less than seven hours each night are at elevated risk of heart attack. These four-hour nights have been going on way, way too long. They leave me sick with exhaustion, and even if I get a decent night’s sleep it takes two nights of rest to start to feel normal. Two full nights’ sleep in a row is a rarity scarce as hen’s teeth.
Meditating on this state of affairs, it occurred to me that the problem has to do with the light that seeps in through the curtains every morning. For years, I’ve awakened at dawn. The first pearly predawn light works just like an alarm clock. The curtains on the bedroom Arcadia door, at the outset pretty skimpy, are made of beige coarsely woven fabric. Even though they’re lined, they don’t block much light, and since they barely cover the window, plenty of light pours in around the edges.
What if I could block early-morning light from getting into the bedroom? Maybe I could build curtains of outdoor fabric and hang them on the outside of the doors, adding a light- and heat-blocking layer on the exterior side of the perennially overheated glass. Combined with darker drapes on the inside, that might do the trick.
Actually, the curtain-rod hangers in there accommodate two rods, so I could in theory hang two pairs of curtains on the interior. The proposed exterior drapes would then create not one, not two, but three layers of fabric. Hm.
Well, before I go to the trouble and expense of making three sets of drapery and drilling holes in the exterior masonry to hang tacky-looking curtain rods, I figure I’d better find out whether this theory works. Hence, a little experiment.
Research question:Would a dawn-sensitive subject sleep a full seven hours if no light could penetrate the sleeping chamber?
Research methodology:Plaster the windows with tinfoil and then try to sleep through the night.
Preliminary results:Well, the subject did sleep seven hours last night. Nodded off around quarter to eleven and woke up at quarter to six.
Discussion:This, of course, doesn’t prove a thing. Now and again, I do sleep seven hours, and last night in spite of an hour-long afternoon siesta, I was dead tired. But there’s nothing (other than aesthetic queasiness) to keep me from leaving the tinfoil décor up for a few more nights.
So, the plan now is to wait and see. If, over the next week or so, I find I can sleep all night long in a room plunged into inky darkness, then by all means I’ll put up fuller, darker drapes on the inside. And maybe even build some exterior drapes, though it escapes me how these would be secured in the gale-force winds of monsoon season.
In between times, pass the moonshine. And why don’t y’all join me and Sarah here at the manse for some grits and coffee?
What do you reckon they’re doing with them hanging plants? My daddy would never in a million years have put up with them things, pullin’ the eaves down. Not unless they’re plastic, so’s you don’t have to water ’em.
Money Beagle recently offered a series of strategies to help consumers avoid the dreaded impulse buy. The four hints there are filled with good words and true.
Some years ago, SDXB taught me an easy and surprisingly effective anti-impulse buy strategy. When you’re in the store, pick up the object that you covet. Examine it carefully. See if it really, truly has or does whatever you think you want. While you’re turning it over in your hands, consciously ask yourself, “Do I really need this?”
Then, set it back on the shelf and go on about the rest of your shopping. Get everything else you went to the store specifically to buy. Once you have spent some time elsewhere in the store, return to the impulse-buy object.
By the time you get back, nine times out of ten the answer to your question will have coalesced in your mind. And the answer is usually “nope.”
Okay, so one train of thought that’s been going on here at Funny about Money has to do with the dawning realization that I’m spending too many hours on work that doesn’t pay a living wage and too few hours on actual…well, living.
In a good month, FaM returns about two hundred bucks, and that’s fine, because it’s exactly the amount I need to get out of one section of freshman comp a year. Or, more to the point, to make up for an assigned section that doesn’t gel.
And I normally make $200 or $250 a month reading detective novels (!) for my favorite client, Poisoned Pen Press. This amount covers a second freshman comp section each year, and of course it’s pay for play.
So, between them these two piddling sources of income either give me the option of teaching two and two (i.e., two courses a semester) instead of three and three or provide a safety net should one of three assigned sections not gather enough students to fly.
For both these income streams, pay per hour is beneath laughable. FaM earns about $6.67 a day, on average; spending two hours on a post and another hour on blog-related web-surfing yields a pay rate of $2.19 an hour. Earnings for editing the novels are somewhat better: $12 an hour.
Usually, those novels serve as bed-time reading, so the work I do on them doesn’t occupy productive daytime hours.
After a little experimentation, I’ve found that if I get up off my rear end in the morning and do some yardwork, housework, dog walking, or socializing before settling in to paying work, I can put off writing blog posts until the evening. It’s something that can be done, as it was in the beginning, from an overstuffed chair in front of the television. That strategy defuses the blogging work by moving it out of daytime hours that should be better paid or at least should provide some fun, exercise, or relaxation time.
Now. What about the teaching?
What, really, does it pay by the hour? And is there a way to manage time used in teaching to ensure a decent hourly wage?
Well, I did a little English-major math and made some interesting discoveries. First, I posited that a “decent” rate would be about $30 an hour, approximately what I was earning at GDU before the layoff. Second, I established that I should work no more than five days a week—I should get weekends off to sing in the choir, schmooze with my son, and do whatever I feel like doing. A community college course here in Maricopa County, Arizona, pays $2,400. With those as givens, let us ask…
How many hours can you put into a community college course and still earn a decent wage?
Okay, so what we see here is that no matter how many weeks the course spans, the maximum number of hours you can work on the course to keep the pay rate at $30/hour or better is 80. Next area of inquiry: is that realistic?
To keep your rate at $30/hour, what is the maximum number of hours you could spend on a course working outside of class meeting time?
Well, if you add up the number of hours per period and multiply by the number of class meetings, you find that an eight-week course meets about 42 hours; a sixteen-week course meets 40 hours. Since the excessively long meeting time for the short-form course requires several breaks, you could (sort of) argue that class meeting time for the eight-week course is actually about 40 hours, too.
A fully online course, by definition, has no class meetings, but it requires a great deal more course preparation time.
To keep your pay rate at $30 an hour for an eight-week course, you could spend no more than five hours a week outside of class, giving you one hour a day of grading and interaction time.
With no face-to-face (F2F) time, an online course provides a full ten hours a week for grading and online interaction with students.
For a 16-week F2F course, you could spend no more than two and a half hours a week outside of class. That’s only a half an hour a day, five days a week.
On the face of it, this doesn’t look very practical; realistically, one spends many hours a week reading student papers and answering e-mails. However, it’s not as dire as the figures above suggest, because you can manipulate due dates so that some weeks pass with no incoming. So, let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective:
How many hours does it really take to grade student papers?
The community college district requires four papers for English 101 and three papers for English 102. A typical set of freshman comp papers takes four to six hours to grade.
Okay, an hour an a half is still not long enough to grade a set of papers. However, assuming one doesn’t have to grade a set of papers every single week, then what? In fact, with 40 hours of in-class time, you have another 40 hours, at $30/hour, available to read student papers. That provides plenty of leeway to perform 24 hours’ worth of grading!
This optimistic conclusion, alas, leaves out the untold numbers of hours one spends in course preparation.
How much time could you spend on course prep and still gross $30 an hour?
In reality, it takes about four or five full-time, eight-hour days to prep a composition course, especially in the semesters when a new edition of the overpriced textbook comes out.
Thus, to make this work, prep time would have to be cut to no more than sixteen to twenty-two hours. All scutwork—that is, all checking and scoring of in-class exercises, drafts, and homework—would have to be foisted on a teaching assistant, so that all the instructor had to read would be the required, final full-length papers. Assuming about 15 or 16 hours of scutwork, I could afford to pay a T.A. $10 an hour and still be left with enough to buy groceries.
If all one read were the required papers and a T.A. scored the other student activities, how many hours would you spend on a course and what would you earn per hour?
It works out. Of course, about fifteen of those hours would actually earn only $20/hour, but the $10/hour wage for one’s T.A. would be tax-deductible.
In its strange way, this perspective starts to make things look a little better. First, what we see is that teaching, even adjunct, is my best and steadiest source of income. And on inspection, we see that I’m actually grossing approximately what I earned, per hour, at GDU. It explains why I seem to have plenty of cash during the nine months of the school year, and it suggests that even one course over the summer would chase away the summertime budgetary doldrums.
What can be done to bring course preparation time under control?
There, too, I have a plan.
The base content (such as it is) of freshman composition has not changed since I started teaching the subject about 40 years ago. There are only so many ways you can explain what an essay is, what a research paper is, and how to write them. This means that every newly adopted textbook and every new edition of an existing textbook is just another rehash of the same material.
So, prep time could be cut by creating fungible modules that can be plugged in to each new semester’s sections to fit time available. We might call such modules “learning module templates.” These would key reading assignments to subject matter, and writing assignments to specific patterns of development, not to chapters in the current textbook. Thus if in a given week you want to teach students a specific mode of discourse, you simply take whatever textbook you’re handed and look for the chapters or passages that discuss that.
To avoid having to create new assignments for each new textbook edition, you would have to be sure never to key a writing assignment to a reading selection (i.e., a sample essay) printed in the text, since these tend to change as new editions are churned out. You could require students to use the book’s selections as source material for their essay citations; this wouldn’t stop plagiarism, but at least students would feel they were using the textbooks more fully.
Each module could contain the following
• The module’s learning goals • Subject matter that should be addressed in reading • Homework, related to this subject matter but independent of specific reading matter • In-class lectures, discussions, and activities • Writing assignment, if any (depending on the number of weeks/course)
If you made the modules generic enough, it would be very easy to pick and choose to fit your timeframe, and quick to plug in new reading material and resources to make the broad choices specific.
It would take some time to create these things, but once they were in place, each semester’s prep time would drop to a few hours.
So what does it all mean for Working Smarter?
In the first place, sideline enterprises that earn less than a living wage should be relegated to the status of hobbies. They should not be permitted to consume time that could be spent more profitably, nor should they be allowed to morph into work.
Blogging, for example, should be as entertaining as reading detective novels. It should never be treated as a job. In other words, I should not be trudging in to my office every morning, there dutifully to crank out another post. I should not be checking e-mail every few hours to screen out spam and accept comments from real humans—instead, do this at the end of the day. Adsense? Alexis? Google Analytics? Awstats? Is there some point in tracking data whose significance is negligible, except as gratification for a hobby? Obviously not. These should be ignored; certainly never checked more than once a week.
In the second place, the number of hours put into decently paying work should be tightly controlled so that the per-hour wage never drops below a minimum threshold.
With teaching, it appears this is eminently possible. Medicare keeps overhead down so that, given enough sections, $30 an hour amounts to a middle-class wage. The only drawback to focusing solely on teaching as the “real” source of income is that it doesn’t pay enough to add to savings. However, next year I should be able to get some summer courses, and in that case, any editing and blogging income can be rolled into savings. That would fund my Roth each year, as long as I can dodder into a classroom or sit in front of computer to teach an online course.
And there really is no third place. It’s pretty simple.
• Move the hobby income out of the center of one’s field of vision. • Focus on the endeavor that earns the most money. • Control time spent on that endeavor to maximize per-hour income.
Another best-laid plan gone awry: I had determined not to post today, but instead to spend Sunday doing other things, most of which entailed getting some exercise and schmoozing with actual humans instead of hanging out with a small dog.
BUT… It’s almost 9:00 a.m., and it’s just 80 degrees here on the back porch! A light breeze is pushing fresh air through the house, and the hummingbirds are jousting over the sugar water ten feet from my table. The houseplants, sated with rainwater, are glorying in the morning sunlight filtered through a layer of pearlescent clouds.
Weather like this is too miraculous to waste sitting inside a church. God, I’m sure, meant us to appreciate Her creation in the experiencing of it.
Sometime around 5:30, Cassie and I awoke to a lovely steady rain. Last night 80 degrees was so damp and sticky as to be gummy; this morning, with the moisture finally dropping out of the sky, the air is fresh and delicious.
After stuffing the dog with leftover chicken, veggies, and quinoa, I realized the indoor plants needed to be watered today and so hauled them out into the rain, and also put the big old five-liter vinegar jugs now used for fertilizing plants under the eaves to collect runoff. (Did you realize it’s against the law to collect rainwater runoff in many Western states? Yesh. Usurps the water rights of downstream and water table users!) So now we have two and a half big jugs of illicit water, capped and stored for the next round of houseplant watering activities. Another jug and a half are empty, but the skies promise still more rain; no doubt those will soon fill, too.
So, it was breakfast on the back porch, for the first time in many a week. How can I express my joy? LOL…maybe this guy can:
You realize, this meant I managed to actually read part of today’s Times! Speaking of the which, did you read Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” this morning? She holds forth on the sad devolution of the ScienceBlogs network from its former Elysian eminence to what she describes as a culture of one-liners, and its break-up over a tacky blog, a creature of PepsiCo, that the administrators, for reasons comprehensible only to those who have worked for commercial print periodicals, decided to put on the site. Heffernan notes a break-down in civility that echoes, sadly given the expensive education and supposed sophistication of the scientists and science writers involved, the tone of far too many much lower-brow sites. She even grouses at GrrlScientist, one of my favorite science blogs, for a crack about the “hugely protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors” of the megafauna visible in any of America’s public places.
Alas, if you track down the quote and visit the post to check out what was really said, you get a blank page (or at least, you do at 9:30 Sunday, August 1, 2010); presumably, either the author has taken it down or traffic is maxing the page. However, it appears that Heffernan took GrrlScientist’s words out of context, or at least so says Kathy Gill at the Moderate Voice. She cites the protrusions and the jigglings along with the words around them. Said GrrlScientist:
It’s taken me a few hours to cool off enough to write coherently and without using (too much) profanity after I learned that ScienceBlogs added a corporate PR “blog” about nutrition written by PepsiCo. I think I’ve learned all I care to know about corporate “food” giants’ definition of what is “nutrition” by being confronted daily by a flock of hugely protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors everywhere I go (yes, even here in Germany).
LOL! B-a-a-a-d journalist, Ginnie. No treats for you today! Yea verily, we might even say “go to your crate and take your lawyer with you!”
Nevertheless, as GrrlScientist and many others report, the schism over Seed Media Group’s move to install a crassly commercial fake blog mounted by a crassly exploitive megamanufacturer of fake food is real, and the result is more than sad for the blogosphere. It may rise to the level of tragic: it represents the destruction of one of the most successful blog networks the Internet has seen, one that has worked to clear the cobwebs of error and fuzzy thinking out of the corners of our collective mind.
True: if many of us are to make a living as Internet writers, particularly on our own sites, some mechanism has must be invented to make blogging profitable. As I’ve observed before, AdSense, which runs a particularly annoying ad on this site displaying cartoon protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors, occasionally returns something in the six figures: if the figures represent fractional pennies. But it takes a month of the coldest days in Hell for FaM to reach that Olympian height. Most of the time it earns between two cents and three bucks a day.
But still. One wonders. To make a living, do we have to sell our souls?
Memo to self: figure out how to get rid of the animated fat lady diet ad.
Maybe we’re on the wrong track, most of us, when we think of blogging as a potentially profit-making enterprise. Maybe writing these things, which really are on the order of diaries or writer’s journals, should be regarded as a labor of love. Any money to be made off them should be generated from more highly developed spinoffs, in the form of print and electronic books. Or, if we’re Uncle Jay or Ramit, from mugs, T-shirts, and online courses.
Ahem. Would any of you like to buy a Funny about Money mug? How’s about a nice T-shirt?
FaM Logo Here! For just $2 extra, get your mug personalized with YOUR NAME in cheery acrylic craft paint!! (Not responsible for Pepsi Cola logos.)
