Coffee heat rising

Weird Wind-up to a Peckish Day

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Fat, bloated raindrops are thumping down out of a strange sky.

The weather is just strange this evening. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.

An hour or two ago I noticed the sky was turning a funny color, sort of yellowy green…like when it hailed last fall. Yipe! That’s all we need: another monster hailstorm.

Anyway, about then I remembered I hadn’t added the chlorine tabs I was supposed to have fed to the pool yesterday, so I went out to get those and found this…like fog!

Very, very hot fog.

It was dust, of course. But what made it weird was that no wind was blowing. It was almost perfectly still out there. Dust was just hanging the air, seemingly of its own dusty volition. For a minute, I thought maybe it was smoke. But you can recognize the smell of smoke. This was just thick air, so thick it felt hard to breathe.

I chased the Cassowary back in the house—dogs are even more susceptible to valley fever than humans, and it makes them a lot sicker—and retreated to the kitchen, there to fry up a satisfyingly greasy dinner.

* * *

The dinner having cooked itself and been consumed, I just stuck my head back out there. Temp is down to a chilly 88. Air is muggy. The wind is scented with the perfume of creosotebush, a beautiful smell like…rain. We’ve had some restive thunder—the Cassie hates that. And now I’m about to clean up the kitchen and go see if anything’s on the TV at 8:00 of a Thursday night. Probably not, but nothing ventured….

* * *

Phone rings. SDXB is back in town, having left New Girlfriend in Colorado so he can come back to ungodly uptown Arizona for the late-summer dove hunt. She has a house in the Boulder area, where they hung out for a fair amount of the summer. Then they decamped to his sister and brother-in-law’s house at the Hood River, traveling by roundabout way of Canada.

SDXB craves to buy a motorcycle.

When he was a young man, mere observation of the homicidal tendencies of Arizona drivers was enough to get him to let loose of the bike he had in those days (he being a fairly bright young man). But now that he’s old, he’s let loose, all right: of his marbles. Says he, he wants to get one of those fat balloony things the old buzzards ride around on, something he can feel comfortable riding at about 70 mph.

Soooo, say I, are you planning to ride NG on this thing, or are you making her buy her own?

Not likely, says he.

Interesting, how women seem to hang onto their marbles longer than men do.

But maybe you’ll ride on it with me.

LOL! I can picture how much NG will love that! So you think I’ll do something that NG is too smart to do? What are you trying to say to me?

SDXB’s cell phone mercifully runs out of gas.

* * *

Bitch of a day!

It should have been a lovely, relaxing day. Today marked the last meeting of the class that meets at 7:00 a.m. Feelings about it are mixed:

• This bunch is one of the two best classes I’ve ever taught. Just loved them all: great, great group of people.

• But god, how I hate hitting the ground with my feet running! Rolling out at 5:00 a.m. (or more often at 3:00 a.m., with no time to grab an extra hour’s sleep after two hours of insomnia) is just flicking painful. So, so glad to have that go away.

So I’d thought I’d have the afternoon to myself. In fact, since all I was doing on this last day was giving them a Mickey-Mouse quiz that would give me a pile of handwriltten, dated evidence that yes, as required, we were all there on the final exam day, I figured to get out the door a little before 8:00 a.m.

But nay.

Just as I was shutting down the computer preparatory to exiting stage left, who should stumble in, swathed in a sleepy fog, but on of my favorite (perennially late) students. Nothing would do but what he had to respond to the stupid questions I’d dreamed up. This, while yakking up a storm.

So it was after 9 before we wandered out of there, me feeling a little irked.

As nothing, in the irkitude department.

Backstory: the college has the most incredible staff of librarians. Or at least it did This summer one of the excellent staff members took it upon herself to retire. This would be depressing enough for the rest of us, but was it enough? Ohhh no! Another very fine librarian forthwith gave notice. Rather short notice, apparently.

So the staff is down by two heavy-duty members, and meanwhile our idiot Tea-Party legislators have been strangling the state’s colleges and universities, cutting to the point of hemorrhage. There’s not enough money left in the budget to replace these women.

One of the many amazing things they would do is come into our classes and provide customized library literacy training: what’s in a library, how to find it, and how to use the vast banks of challenging databases.

Lest you think this ought not to be necessary: no, it ought not. Couple semesters ago a young man told me he hadn’t been in a library for seven years; the last one he’d visited was in his junior high school. He, alas, is not atypical.

So these librarians present some very crucial information, and because of their familiarity with the college’s and the district’s resources, they do it one helluva lot better than I can.

Welp, yesterday—after anyone (like me) who has her act together has had her syllabus, calendar, and 70-page course packet all planned out, put together, and printed (at the expense of many, many hours of unpaid labor)—yesterday they inform us that because what remains of the staff can’t deal with the work, they’re canceling the classroom lectures and replacing them with scheduled workshops. Students can come in and take them at what passes for their convenience.

Of course, given a student body most of whom work full-time or at least part-time, the late-afternoon hours when these events are mostly scheduled are going to be effectively unattainable for my students. That notwithstanding, little choice remains but to require one of these workshops (25 points), which requires something else: a revision of my flicking syllabus!

Well, I couldn’t very well throw out 100 pounds of paper and print new packets, so I had to come up with corrigenda for not one, not two, but three sections. Type that stuff up. Arrange to get it printed. Beg the copy center to get it done by midday Monday.

Complicating matters, we’re told that we can’t just bring a class into the library to work ad lib: we have to arrange ahead of time. I had a half-dozen trips to the library planned, each of which now had to be time-consumingly scheduled.

And the days when librarians are not going to show up to eddycate my students? I had to figure out something to do with them, which largely entailed having to make appointments to drag them to the computer lab so as to get them working on the databases: another endlessly time-consuming chore.

Meanwhile, the puppy yaps, the puppy finds the paperwork for the mortgage on the downtown house and decides to eat it, the puppy pees on the floor, the puppy grabs Cassie and gets walloped, the puppy does dances to puppy joy, the puppy evinces starvation every 30 minutes and has to be fed, the puppy digs a hole under a citrus tree, the puppy grabs Cassie’s Angry Bird out of her mouth and bounces away with it, the puppy has a gay old time. During this celebrating, I have to make my way through a Chase Bank phone maze to find out why they’re charging me a $132 redemption fee because I canceled their damn card. The puppy eats the mortgage documents while I’m on the phone to one Hrothgar or whatever the hell his fake name is. Hrothgar opines that the “redemption fee” is really money they owe me, and that they’re going to send it along to me. Any day now.

That’s nice. The puppy is up to something unknown in the bathroom.

By the time I’ve finished revamping my courses again, the afternoon is over and I haven’t begun to get around to taking down the remains of the summer 102 course’s website and cleaning it up for the new bunch. Bunches, that is.

We have 25 students in the 101 section, 24 in the mid-day MWF 102 section, and only 14 in the Wednesday afternoon endless section. This is good, I guess. Only 14 students, I mean.

Five people have shown up in Buggy Whip Design 201, which means we have a fair shot at seeing the course make by the time it starts in October. I’ll be rich as…as Bilbo Baggins, I expect.

* * *

SDXB says a powerful storm dumped a flood of water out there in Sun City. Some school bus children were trapped under downed power lines. Hereabouts, in the rain shadow of the North Mountains, we got the dust fog, the spattering of fat rain drops, some vague lightning, and eventually a bit of wind.

Weird.

A weird ending to a difficult day. Strange.

 

Paradise Bakery Saves Me Some Dough

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Yesterday morning one of the livelier students asked if anyone else in the room liked fish for breakfast. After the group gave him some fishy looks, one classmate said well, sure, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs is great. And of course I had to chime in that lox & cream cheese on bagels can’t be beat.

So by the time the class broke up around 8:30, I was craving lox and cream cheese. Where to find it, here in the cultural Sahara? In these parts, a Jewish deli is rare as a fur coat on a Mexican hairless pooch.

There’s a Paradise Bakery more or less on the way home, so I dropped by there to order up a bagel with lox and cream cheese.

Amazingly: no luck!

No, indeed.

The Paradise Bakery does have bagels and cream cheese, the latter in several persuasions. But they have no lox.

Briefly I considered: would a bagel with chive cream cheese suffice?

Uh…no. Somehow I’d scrounge something out of the mostly bare cupboard, something (unknown what) that surely would satisfy my craving for salty stuff.

As I climbed into the car to go on my way, it occurred to me that the Safeway a block or two down the road would surely have lox, cream cheese, and bagels. From deep inside the freezer, the coffee beans called me home.

So it was into the Safeway parking lot, making a fast run on the deli.

God help us. The guy behind the deli counter did not know what lox is!

Didn’t believe me about the “cultural Sahara” bit, did you?

He speculated that maybe the meat department would know where to find it, if the store carried it.

Uh huh. The store’s open 24 hours, but the meat department doesn’t open till 9 or 10 ayem.

But luckily, a butcher’s factotum was out in front, filling up the counter’s compartments with fresh ice. She directed me to the cabinet where little plastic bags containing tiny overpriced servings of lox hung in cooled air.

Not ideal. But better than nothing.

Choice of cream cheese: Philadelphia or Safeway brand knock-off, probably manufactured by Philadelphia. What the hell: get the cheapest.

I’ve never been nuts about bagels, and you can be sure the bagels available in a Phoenix supermarket are even gummier and more redolent of library paste than the most average of East-Coast bagels. So in the bakery department I picked up a loaf of fake “artisan” bread: air bread shaped like a bloated baguette.

Sliced and toasted: not a bad imitation of one or the ’tother.

From the fridge, I retrieved half a Bermuda onion…just the thing! Sliced off a bit of it, very thin. In the same cache, what should I discover but a half-full jar of capers!

Hot diggety!

Thick rounds of fake artisan bread, toasted and slathered with industrial cream cheese, topped with onions, capers, and industrial lox: not bad!

Pot of coffee brewed in a French press out of espresso beans: Elysian!

For what it would’ve cost to buy one breakfast bagel and a cup of bad coffee, I got enough ersatz bread, cream cheese and lox to make three or four breakfasts or brunches!

Food, wonderful food! So much more wonderful when you do it yourself…

🙂

 

Haven’t forgotten you…

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Postless in Gaza… Well, in lovely uptown Arizona, anyway, where at a little after 9:00 p.m. the outside temperature hovers just below 100 degrees.

A great raft of 2500-word papers has floated in on the molten sea. I’ve managed to read three of them today. All 20 or so have to be read, assessed, commented upon, and graded by Friday morning.

Sat down to a dinner of poké salmon and tuna, snabbed from Whole Foods on the way home by way of a still relatively decent Target (tar-zhay) on the fringe of what was once an upper-middle-class shopping mall, where I went in search of another baby gate to block Charley from bedrooms where he might eat furniture and kiss electric sockets. To rest my weary eyes while dining in solitude I picked up the latest edition of The Atlantic, which came in the mail today.

Something there is about print, something that turns Internet copy to ephemera.

You need to go out and buy this month’s edition—that would be September 2011. It has impact. If you can’t afford it or you can’t bring yourself to touch paper, then for hevvinsake go to the site. Take a long, horrified look at Don Peck’s piece titled “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?,” in which he describes “the hollowing-out of the American middle class.” Read Rhett Miller’s brief, gut-wrenching mini-memoir, “About That Day.” And whichever side of the gun control issue you happen to reside on, get your mind bent by Adam Winkler’s “Secret History of Guns.”

Can the middle class be saved? There’s a question to file under the heading of “a day late and a dollar short.” Middle class? What middle class?

This morning I had occasion to drive through several of the strip malls that surround the former glory that was Paradise Valley Mall. Next to the Tar-Zhay: a dollar store. I’ve been in that dollar store: it smells bad and there’s not a thing in it anyone who wasn’t pretty desperate would want to buy. Apparently Paradise Valley has enough desperate residents to support it. Across the road: retail strips pockmarked with empty storefronts. Places that are still on your GPS or your iPad or your iPhone that just aren’t there anymore. Other stores hang on in tired buildings that need, at the least, a paint job. This is not the middle-class American shopping center that you and I knew a scant ten years or fifteen years ago.

I am scared.

I’ve never been so scared for my country. And I’m an old lady who has lived through some scary times: the Cold War, when we were serenaded once a week by air-raid sirens atop our apartment building; the Chicago riots; Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis…all the way to 9/11. None of those times seem nearly as scary as the times we’re in right now.

Why?

Because we’re doing it to ourselves. In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, we had an enemy without, even if sometimes that enemy was largely imagined. Today we have an enemy within. We are the enemy within. We consume ourselves.

We who are Americans are destroying America.

There’s no treaty for it, no end to it but entropy. And I am scared. You might be, too.

MORE Money Happens!

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It gets better and better. Yesterday afternoon the division chair’s redoubtable admin called and asked if I’d take on another course this fall! He’d already given me the maximum allowable number of courses—though the magazine writing course doesn’t start till mid-October and right now has only three students—and so this in theory makes four sections.

I’ll be surprised if the magazine writing thing makes—but then, so far I’ve been surprised every semester. It’s akin to taking a course in buggy-whip design. Wish they’d build a course in blog writing and management into their course bank. Since some punkins we know are actually making a living at this, it seems to me to fit right into the community-college mandate: pragmatic education that fosters life-long learning and serves nontraditional students.

Oh well. With or without Buggy Whip Design 201, three sections of composition will save my bedraggled tailfeathers again! 🙂

Though it’s been a busy summer, I’ve really enjoyed teaching the two comp sections that came my way in the second session. Both were really good classes, but the 102 class was one of the best bunches I’ve ever had the privilege of pretending to teach. Smart, highly motivated, and focused, they worked together well and almost all of them responded to the assignments with a high degree of success. It’s been quite a pleasure to work with them.

I think these short courses attract students who are already pretty confident in their abilities, usually with good reason. It would make sense for a student who worries about her or his English skills to enroll in a 16-week course, providing more time to wrestle with the assignments and more chances to get help at the learning center. So apparently the five- and eight-week courses self-select into pools of fluent writers with good study skills. The only serious exception was a lovely young woman who had to deal with some ESL issues in her written (not spoken) English, and she, too, had good reason to expect to succeed: she’s only 16 and is enrolled this fall in AP calculus. Math and science are her strong fields, and she’s evidently so good at them that a grade below an “A” doesn’t register in her consciousness.

Well, back to the subject at hand, our favorite topic, money. This development will make it possible for me to revamp the cash flow scheme along the lines that Frugal Scholar has suggested in many of her comments here: simplifying toward minimalism.

The issue is how to survive on a variable income, one that can produce some paychecks as low as a couple hundred bucks and some upwards of seventeen hundred dollah. For the staid at heart, this does nothing to foster a state of zen calm.

My plan now is to make Survival Savings a kind of “pool” account. All money other than Social Security will go into this fund, whether it’s teaching income, RASL, income tax refunds, insurance reimbursements, or the annual Costco AMEX rebate.

Social Security lands in my checking account whenever the government feels like sending it—deposit dates this year have ranged from  the 7th to the 13th of the month. So that plug of income will form the base income for the month. On the first of each month I’ll transfer the rest of what I need to pay the bills from Survival Savings, which will now hold every penny of income other than Social Security. The first-of-the-month transfer will tide me over until Social Security is finally deposited. Because Social Security is a fixed payment, the amount I need to come up with from other sources is pretty much the same from month to month: about $1300, up from $1100 because of the not-really-inflationary increases in grocery and power costs.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to keep the self-escrow account to hold each month’s dribbles toward the annual property tax, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, and Medigap insurance. Given my colorful arithmetic skills, I can’t afford to take a chance of accidentally spending so much that I can’t cover one or more of those costs. So there’s a bookkeeping complication that, alas, can’t go away.

And I’ll keep the emergency/diddle-it-away savings account, which helped a great deal with this summer’s dental and automotive exploits. It gets $200 a month.

Because of the rules about the number of transfers you can make from a money market or savings account, I guess those automatic transfers (for tax & insurance self-escrow and for the extraneous spending) will still have to come out of checking, rather than going direct from Survival Savings, which resides in the money market. To be safe, I think it would be better to make one transfer a month from that and then disburse the monthly self-escrow transfers from checking, which has no limit on the number of withdrawals one can make. That way, if a really big expense comes up, there’ll still be a few allowable transfers left on the money market account.

Burdensome banking rules notwithstanding, though, this scheme will fill in the potholes on the road to solvency. Despite the irregular income, the fact is if I’m teaching three & three plus anything else that comes my way, enough comes in over the course of a year to cover the bills—it’s just that in some months nothing comes in, and given my peculiar psychology, I find that unnerving. In a way, turning Survival Savings into a pool that collects the springwater of my on-again off-again income will make the variability of the income irrelevant. As long as Survival Savings lasts (probably another 18 months to two years), I’ll withdraw a steady, unchanging figure from it.

When it’s gone…well, then I’ll just have to come up with some new scheme.

Susan-B.-Anthony-Dollar

 

Whoa! Money happens!!

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Criminey, I go from feeling poor as a church mouse to rich as Croesus. My life is a symphony of clichés.

My precious....

The community college district extruded a paycheck today: $1348.75 that I don’t need to live on this month or next  month. According to my excruciating calculations, all the bills for this month are now covered, barring another colorful exploit by the Gods of Summer Expenses. If nothing else goes wrong, every penny of that 13.5 hundred dollah is mine, all mine!

ohhhh cash it out in one-dollar bills, strew it across the floor, and roll around in it!

Well, actually: Transfer it over to long-term survival savings. Hot dang! That’s over a month of living expense money.

Last December, acting on the advice of financial counsel, I made the decision to use the rest of the post-tax emergency savings that, on Canning Day, resided in my bank account to defer the need to draw down from pre-tax brokerage and IRA accounts. According to this logic, the longer I could avoid drawing from the pre-tax funds, which represent  my true retirement savings, the better. At the time, enough remained in what’s now dubbed the Survival Savings account to cover about ten months. This September was the tenth month. Last December, I figured that fund would run out on September 1.

But nay!

With today’s transfer, the fund contains enough to last for another eight and a half months! A miracle!

So, thanks to my having stashed every windfall and every snowflake into Survival Savings, this means a fund I thought would help support me for ten months is actually going to do the job for eighteen months.

In fact, it very probably will last longer than that. Because…

Until the end of spring semester, I was dumping my entire paycheck into M’hijito’s and my joint account for paying the underwater mortgage. This was significantly more than my share in any given month, but I wanted to be sure we had enough to cover the summer, when I needed to use my pay to cover the higher cost of living. In September, I’ll begin paying back into that kitty, but instead of forking over every penny, I’ll deposit only my share—$717. About eight months out of twelve, that’s less than I actually earn.

I’d originally thought, well, I’ll just spend the leftover on myself, since I do tend to feel pretty pinched, especially when unplanned expenses arise. However, I’ve now decided that instead of doing that, I’ll shovel every extra dollar into the Survival Savings account and then, from that kitty, dole out a slightly larger amount than I’ve been giving myself. This will provide a few extra dollars for small indulgences but still slow the depletion of that account to some extent.

So, it looks like…I think…that fund will end up lasting even longer than another eight months, because I’ll be adding two or three hundred dollars a month to it, offsetting the $1,100 a month drawdown that helps cover living expenses. Plus next February’s RASL payment (about four grand) and any tax refund will go into the survival fund, too.

That’s reassuring. Makes me feel a lot better than I did two days ago, when I wrote the post that went live earlier this morning!

Image: Graffiti depiction of Gollum on the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall. Gorgalore. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

Summer Budget Overruns: When that sneaking feeling is right…

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This summer I’ve had the same feeling that I had last summer: as soon as the weather gets ultrahot and the power and water bills head for the stratosphere, that’s when everything goes expensively wrong and you get a hailstorm of unplanned bills.

Last summer I spend $3,348 on unexpected costs after all was said and done—not counting indulgences, of which there were precious few. In fact, there was only one: about $230 worth of artsy-looking clothes at the Yarnell Emporium, outfits that I’m still wearing this summer. So total unplanned and unnecessary expenditures last summer came to about $3,580.

I’ve felt a little more flush this summer, what with the summer classes, and so have imagined I could go out to eat now and again and also buy some clothing and shoes. Over the same span of months, I’ve coughed up $2,951 to cover surprise expenses—virtually all dental and medical bills, car repair bills, and pool maintenance and repair costs. Because getting two summer courses to teach made me feel more confident, I lost control in the self-indulgence department, going out to eat with friends and blithely spending on clothing, jewelry (well…street fair craft jewelry, but still: baubles), and shoes. These extravagances have added up to $1,094 so far, for a total of $4,684 in unplanned and unnecessary spending over the summer.

No wonder I feel broke!

This slide toward ruin started in the late spring, when during the March/April budget cycle I dropped $120 on the amber craft-fair jewelry and $201 on pain-free shoes. It went downhill from then on.

It appears that the reason I don’t run in the red in the winter is because my bills are so low I can afford to eat out two or three times a month and even indulge some other whims. In the winter, there’s about $300 of play in the budget, because year-round the budget assumes summer-level utility expenses. But it also appears that in the winter, nothing happens! The pool does not crap out (it’s not working very hard). The car runs like a top. The dog would never think of ingesting any suspect substances. The teeth wait until the weather warms before they crumble out of my mouth.

Come the summer, though…

This summer, overspending on optional things, like socializing with friends in restaurants and buying clothing, shoes, and baubles, has averaged $283 a month. Average forced overspending on things that can’t be put off, such as dental procedures and car repairs, has been $622  a month. Think of that: on average, I’ve run $905 over budget, all summer long.

{ugh}

Welp, I think the twin messages are

a) during the summer, I must—absolutely must—stay out of restaurants; and
b) I simply can not buy clothes during the summer sales, or under any other circumstances between April and the end of September.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m earning a few pennies extra by slaving away in the classroom all through the 115-degree summer: I certainly am not netting $900 a month!

I’ve had to make up the difference by raiding various cookie-jar savings accounts: monthly savings slated for indulgences like clothing; tax & insurance savings;…and then the base survival savings account, from which I’ve now drawn two months’ worth of living expenses to pay the dentist. There’s no way to replenish that account, and so thanks to my teeth falling apart, I’m short the money planned to support me for two months in 2011/12. Instead of running out in November, I’ll run out of cash at the end of August…just, as we know, when expenses will be highest. 🙄

Gotta quit spending!