Coffee heat rising

Social Security Outcome: Positive!

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Well! So I march up to the North Phoenix Social Security office just as they’re opening the doors. The place is mobbed—turns out every holiday creates a backlog the following Monday morning.

Wait about half an hour for my number to be called. Present the mystifying letter to the highly professional youngish woman behind the window.

And lo!

The number in the letter does not represent a gross payment (as in previous correspondence). It’s a net payment! So the $1021.70 “regular monthly payment” represents a $64 increase, not a $236 cut in pay.

That’s if we believe this particular representative, something experience suggests is an iffy proposition. She says my gross benefit has increased to something over $1,300. Why? Because of the $14,400 I’ve earned this year!

Apparently if you keep working and keep paying FICA after you’ve claimed Social Security, they adjust your benefits upward for as long as you continue to earn.

If this is true, it’s good news. It should cover inflation in 2011—Social Security recipients again will not get a cost of living increase, because of course we all know that the costs of groceries and gasoline and utilities haven’t increased over the past year and surely won’t go up next year.

However, I’ll believe it when I see the money in the bank. It strikes me as way too good to be true.

Jousting with the Bureaucrats…Again!

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In an hour and a half, it’s off to the Social Security office to do battle with the bureaucracy again. I’m going to try to be there when the door opens.

Apparently they’re cutting my benefit by something over $235 a month. The reason? I earned more than they thought so they’re raising my benefit.

Huh? you ask.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought.

Friday afternoon, this amazing communication arrived by snail-mail:

We checked our records to seer if any changes in your benefits are necessary.

We are increasing your benefit amount to give you credit for additional earnings which were not included when we figured your benefit before.

What We Will Pay and When

You will receive a payment on or about December 8, 2010 for $1,442.40. This payment includes both your new regular monthly benefit and benefits due from January 2010, the month of the increase, through November 2010.

After that you will receive your regular monthly payment of $1,021.70.

WTF?!?? My regular benefit is and has been, since the start, $1,257.50. The “new” monthly payment with its “increase” is a $236 cut in pay!

Looking back over the correspondence I’ve received from the Social Security Administration over the past year, I see that at one point they decided my benefit was $1068.40. I must not have noticed that; otherwise I would’ve had a shitfit at that point…more likely, I imagined that was the net amount. The fact is, though, the figures in these memos are always gross amounts, way, way, way off from what really lands in your bank account. At any rate, that figure never materialized: the gross payment has always been $1,257, and that’s the amount they took away from me for the crime of earning such a vast amount in part-time adjunct teaching that I owed $340 in extra taxes.

Evidently, the SSA can at any moment decide to change your benefit amount, and evidently whatever they’ve been doing based on whatever they figured sometime in the past is moot.

Isn’t it interesting how they invariably send these damn things so they appear in your mailbox on a Friday afternoon after their offices are closed? Then you get to stew about it over the weekend.

In fact, this meant I got to work over the weekend, instead of having time to myself as planned. A raft of student papers was due at 11:59 last night. Spending half the day at the SS office will mean I won’t have enough time to read an entire batch of papers today, unless I work until midnight. So, to stave off a half-overnighter, I spent Sunday afternoon reading the papers that came in early. Fortunately, that included about half of them, so there should only be about three or four hours of work to do today.

But that was not what I wanted to do with Sunday afternoon.

A Handmade Christmas Present: Bath Powder

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Have you noticed how difficult it’s getting to buy scented bath powder? Drugstores have about stopped carrying it—probably because talc is now believed to cause respiratory problems and even cancer. You can still buy it at a department store, but a brand like Guerlain or Lanvin charges sixty bucks for a box of it!

After I decided to move up from bluejeans last spring, I was reminded of why one wants bath powder: it’s mighty uncomfortable to walk around in a skirt on a hot, sweaty day. Baby powder works OK, but between you and me, I don’t want to go around smelling like the changing table.

Making your own bath powder is easy and cheap. Take a look at the ingredients on a can of Johnson’s baby powder: it’s mostly cornstarch!

You can use 100 percent cornstarch, creating a soft, soothing powder that absorbs moisture and adds no extraneous perfumes. If you’d like a deodorant effect, you can add baking soda; the proportion is one part baking soda to three parts cornstarch. Some people add rice flour, but this is difficult to find and unnecessary.

To add scent, simply spritz a cotton ball with your favorite perfume or scent it with some vanilla or an essential oil. Let the cotton ball get dry, and then toss it into a Ziplock bag with the unscented powder. Shake well. Leave the scented cotton in with the powder for about three days, shaking once a day…and voilà! Bath powder in your favorite scent! After the powder has absorbed enough scent, remove the cotton ball.

Get a pretty shaker can or jar to present it to a loved one for Christmas. For myself, I just keep it in a convenient container. A small jar with holes punched in the lid works well.

To gild the lily, you can easily make a powder puff. All you need is some fleece or other fuzzy textured fabric, some satin or brightly colored fabric, a short length of ribbon, and a little batting. Cut a circle out of each fabric, so you have two identically sized circles about six inches in diameter. Take a piece of ribbon and cut off a six-inch long piece.

Place the fabric circles together face to face with the ribbon sandwiched between them. The ribbon can go across the diameter or be laid diagonally across the circle. Stitch around the perimeter, leaving an inch or so open. Turn the resulting powder-puff casing inside out, so the right faces and the ribbon are on the outside. Stuff the casing with cotton or synthetic batting and then stitch the opening closed.

If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, you can buy a less fancy powder puff for around $2.00.

Many people believe that cornstarch “feeds” fungi and therefore should not be used if you’re prone to yeast infections or on a baby’s diaper rash. Recent studies, however, show that this is untrue—cornstarch does not aggravate yeast infections. Indeed, at least one cream designed for diaper rash is full of cornstarch. For other reasons, I would not put any perfumed powder on intimate places. And if Baby has a diaper rash, it should be treated with a cream or ointment for the purpose. Diaper rash or a yeast infection that goes untreated will get worse, whether or not you apply powder to the affected area.

When you go to buy cornstarch, read the ingredients. Clabber Girl contains added calcium. I bought Argo because it’s 100 percent cornstarch with no adulterants.

Amazon Prime: Worth the Cost?

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Just signed up for a month’s free trial of Amazon’s “Prime” membership program. Why not? A month of free shipping at Christmastime: hard to resist!

Do you think Amazon Prime is worth the annual membership fee of around $80 over the long haul? Hereabouts, sales taxes are now 9.7% and probably rising. With free shipping plus prices that often beat brick-and-mortar retailers, a savings of almost 10% on each purchase is significant.

Or is it? To break even on that $80 purchase, you’d have to buy almost $850 worth of goods every year. How many people have $850 worth of stuff shipped to their house?

Seems to me there are three hidden costs with Amazon Prime:

1. that $850 threshold you’d have to pass to pay for the $80 membership fee;

2. the severe temptation to pounce on every “bargain” that comes along, leading you to buy a lot of junk you don’t need; and

3. the enormous harm done to local merchants by just such massive mega-retailers as Amazon.

For many of us, the third isn’t very operative. The Phoenix area, which has cloned Los Angeles’s sprawl and embraced every soulless scheme of Big Business that ever came down the pike, is hardly what you’d call heavy on local merchants. I buy most of my groceries at Costco and Safeway. The few farmer’s markets feature more craft vendors than produce and meat growers, and they take place at inconvenient times, in inconvenient locales.  My clothing comes from Costco or the only two chains that carry outfits that aren’t too ugly on an old lady, and my electronics by and large come from Apple or the roundly hated Fry’s. No one who lives here has many choices: the malls host nothing but chain stores, and local enterprises are few and very far between. Amazon is not about to make me quit shopping at only local merchant I frequent, AJ’s.

But if you lived in a real city or in a small town with character, it could pose a problem.

The second, junkomania…well. That’s another matter.

I want this thing this thing, for example. Oboy do I want to try one of those! It’s called a “Ruby Stone,” and women all over the Web rave about it. Came across it on another site where a bunch of manicurists and their customers were doing some sort of dance to spring over it and decided it’s THE substitute for expensive pink emery boards whose sandpaper wears right off by the third use. I have a couple of glass nail files which work well and don’t wear out readily. But these women say the Ruby Stone is even better. It only costs $1.84, meaning that the cost of shipping, if you’re paying it, would about quadruple the price. So: free shipping? Junk acquisition!

But for just a dollar eighty-four…who could resist?

On the other hand, after I’ve paid the $1.84 plus $0 shipping, I’ll still have $848.16 to go before the free shipping pays for the membership cost.

Because Amazon plies you with “Today’s Deals” (OMG!! A large Moleskine ruled notebook for only $8.02!), you could very well rack up another $848.16 in a year’s time.

But…do you want to? do you need to?

How do I love it? Let me count the ways...

Shop local and get a $25 AMEX kickback

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One of my colleagues sends this intelligence:

If you have an American Express card, go to this site to register the card. Then on Saturday go buy something from a local small business and get a $25 credit. More information about this campaign and its tie-in to Facebook appears here.

“You Are How You Caffeinate”

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Hurry! Buy me for Christmas!

Hang onto your hat, Frugal Scholar! 😀 Yesterday evening while perusing the Times, I was reminded of Frugal’s recent post on small recurring costs, in which she remarks with amazement on the recent coffee pod phenomenon. This increasingly popular method for preparing a cup of coffee—just one!—entails making room for a coffeemaker the size of an infant stegosaurus and feeding it expensively prepared, vacuum-sealed single-serving “K-cups” of coffee grounds. “Do these have any redeeming features?” wonders she.

What's not to love?

Hilariously, there are caffeine delivery systems that make the coffee pod look like the soul of common sense. Almost. NYT writer Frank Bruni’s column on the subject is one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever read. Shamed by foodie friends over his reliance on his trusty Mr. Coffee (to which he had recourse after a Chemex spat in his eye), Bruni goes in search of a tonier, less bourgeois method of brewing an acceptable cup of java. Working against him: a burning desire not to have to work very hard over his morning eye-opener.

Maybe better not to know...

Along the way, he discovers things that look like something from a chemistry lab (well—the Chemex looks a bit that way, but these contraptions are straight from Isaac Newton’s alchemy lab). He learns that hot water may not be dumped unceremoniously over one’s freshly ground, shade-grown, fair-traded coffee beans, but must be drizzled lovingly through the grounds, only after one has released their “bloom” with a delicate pre-pouring through a carefully rinsed and placed filter.

Poetry in glass, plastic, and stainless

He also learns that the French press, my preferred way to generate a decent cup, is teetering on the edge of obsolescence! Heaven help us.

All I want for Christmas is a lifetime supply of French press carafes. They can reside in the closet with my stashes of incandescent lightbulbs and dishwasher tabs that still wash dishes. A French press produces something akin to cowboy coffee: strong, thick, bracing, and richly flavored. It does not turn the brew to battery acid by holding the coffee over a hot plate for hours. Nor does it have to: believe me, coffee made this way will not sit around long enough to get cold.

After what must have been days of journalistic research, Bruni arrives at a conclusion that surely will warm the cockles of Frugal’s heart: “For me personally, was the pleasure of a higher grade of coffee worth the price? In this instance, couldn’t I depart from the orthodoxy (nay, tyranny) of the artisanal? . . . The current generation of automatic drip machines preserves the [Mr. Coffee] tradition while improving, I’m told, on the product. Gastronomic guilt be damned, I just may put one on my Christmas list.”

Get it here, without having to take out a loan!