Coffee heat rising

Balancing the Budget on the Backs of the Vulnerable…Again!

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What is it about Americans and American politicians that we think it’s OK to let the rich and the corporations get by with low or no taxes and then cover the deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable people in our society?

Our government, much reviled by the right for its new “progressive” leadership, is going to cut Medicare reimbursements to doctors by 21 percent!

Medicare reimbursements already don’t cover a doctor’s cost of doing business. Many doctors here won’t see patients who are on Medicare, and many more won’t take on new Medicare patients. The Mayo, where my doctor moved after “managed care” by HMOs first started making physicians’ lives miserable, will (for the time being) keep seeing you if were a regular patient before you were switched to Medicare, but it will not accept new Medicare recipients. One branch of the Mayo here in the Valley, a practice on the west side, fired all its Medicare patients and now sees no one who doesn’t have private insurance.

I expect that will be the way the main Mayo Clinic will go, too. Even though the present cut may (or may not) be temporary, the message is clear: expect a permanent version in the near future.

{sigh} The level of medical care here in Arizona leaves a lot to be desired. No doubt there are horror stories in every state in the union, but I’ll bet in many states not every single resident has a story to tell. In Arizona, unless you’re lucky enough and stubborn enough to stay away from doctors and hospitals, you’ve got a war story. The Mayo is one of only three hospitals (the last I looked) that has a top rating in national rankings of clinical care and safety.

So, when you find a decent doctor, you want to hang on to that doctor. The last thing you want is to be bounced from doctor to doctor, or to be forced to see someone whose competence you mistrust or who is too overworked to spend more than five minutes speaking with you.

It’s not “Cadillac care” to have a doctor whose skills are competent and who has fifteen or twenty minutes (or more, preferably) to listen to a patient and arrive at a thoughtful diagnosis.

This vicious slash in Medicare is going to put a lot of elderly people out on the street and yes, bouncing from doctor to doctor. If they can even find a doctor. It will push most of us into low-quality clinics or to hungry young practitioners without the experience and wisdom one needs to see in a doctor. I’m still fairly young—only just eligible for Medicare—and I’m too old to go through that. Imagine the suffering and just plain bad medical care this will inflict on people who are too frail to fight the system!

Inexcusable.

Arboricide

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Cézanne, The Big Trees

My neighbor Sally did in the vast Aleppo pine that she’s hated with verve for many years.

I understand her issue: they’re radically messy. Aleppo pines, which were very popular here when our houses were built in the 1970s, are fast-growing and more or less xeric. They tolerate heat and drought pretty well. But they get to be huge, and in the powerful winds that roar through here in the summertime, limbs the size of a whole tree will snap off and land on people’s homes.

The house that was flattened during the late, great tornado was smushed by an Aleppo.

The other drawback to this vastly shady tree is that it sheds copiously. In the summer when the monsoon winds blow through, a mature tree will cover your yard, your neighbors’ yards, the sidewalks, and the street for half-a-block around in a layer of sharp brown dead pine needles. It’s a huge mess to clean up, and neighbors of the less laid-back variety can get quite irked, especially when the mess falls into their pools.

Sally has wanted to be rid of that tree for a long time, but her companion of many years, Katherine, would have none of it. Katherine finally passed, after an unholy long, slow death from the awful aftereffects of a stroke. Sally cared for her during the decade it took for her to die, a crushing job. Sally used to say that there were many things she wanted to do to improve the house, but she couldn’t, because having workers around would upset Katherine, as would any significant change in their environment. So she’s let things go for a long time.

Tree-killers-at-work

With Katherine gone and herself finally recovered from the exhaustion brought on by caring for an invalid, Sally has gone to town with fixing up the house. She tiled the back patio and pulled out a decrepit hot tub, replacing it with new patio space. And, alas, she got rid of the tree.

The other day three huge trucks pulled up in front of my house, and the forewoman jumped out and started eyeballing Carlos and Inez’s equally gigantic Aleppo. That tree has been well cared for—if you have them thinned once every few years, they pose little threat to surrounding structures—so I was surprised when it looked like they were going to cut it down. Soon enough, though, Carlos and Inez’s daughter came out and chased them off.

They were on the wrong street. This street and the one just to the north, where Sally lives, have the same name; one’s an avenue and one’s a lane. So they drove around the block and alit where they belonged.

At first I hoped maybe she was only having them cut out the dead branches, because that’s where they started. The tree had quite a lot of dead growth. Although they’re xeric, even an Aleppo can’t tolerate the kind of heat and drought we’ve had over the past several years. They do need to be deep-watered when temperatures get ridiculous, as they did last summer when we had a long string of 118-degree days. Quite a few Aleppos in this area have started to die back, because people just can’t afford to let the hose run on the ground for eight or ten hours and then turn around a week later and do it again.

It probably was so stressed it would have died anyway. But it’s too bad. I loved that tree. From my backyard, it filled about a third of the sky. And although it was too far away to cast shade (or pine needles) on my lot, it did soften the glare.

By mid-afternoon, the was gone. And glare was what was left: enough hot, eye-squinching sky to make your head hurt. No joke: it was actually painful to look out from under the patio cover toward the heat-soaked blank spot in the sky.

It’s not cheap to take down a tree like that. One of my neighbors at the old house had two of them taken out of her front yard, to the tune of a thousand bucks apiece. I don’t think Sally is exactly rolling in money…the reason they were living together, from what I can tell, was not that they were lovers but that they had thrown in together to pool their resources so they could spend their old age in a safe neighborhood, a pre-Baby Boom co-housing arrangement. Catherine had been a choir director; I don’t know what Sally did, but it’s pretty clear neither of them earned a lot of money during their working years.

To spend a thousand bucks to lose a big, beautiful old tree…gosh. And wait’ll she sees next month’s power bill! In this climate, a tree like that can save as much as 30 percent on air conditioning. Even at my house, the additional glare and heat pouring in through the empty space where the tree was will probably push the up the bill some.

Wish she’d at least tried cutting out the dead branches before she chopped it down.

The Boozicle

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So, after another long and amazingly workful day, I poured a tall bourbon & water to go with the (pretty remarkable!) spaghetti dinner I whipped up for myself. But could only get around half of it. Needing to take the dog for a walk, I stuck the rest of it in the freezer, thinking that after we got home, I could pour some very cold booze into a plastic cup and enjoy it while floating around the pool.

It was off to the park for some serious sniffing of doggy perfumes and then a tour around our corner of Richistan to admire the way our betters live. Back to the house to toss together a mess of beans with onion, celery, herbs, tomato sauce, and the dregs of a ten-days-open bottle of wine.

Finally, at last, it’s time to pull the chilled highball out of the fridge and head for the pool.

Chilled is an understatement. Booze iceberg, that’s what we had. Alas, I didn’t think of photographing it while it wouldn’t budge out of the upside-down glass. Here it’s mostly defrosted. But you get the general idea.

Who knew alcohol would form a boozicle? Next time I’ll drop a popsicle stick in the glass and have a handy little treat for nocturnal pool floating. 😉

Revise That Budget!

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Summertime, and the living is…darned scary! With no real steady pay flowing from the community college into the money bin, I get nervous, even when I know very well that the vast emergency fund sitting in the credit union will cover a full year’s worth of expenses. To start with, I don’t want to use the emergency fund for day-to-day expenses, and to end with, I’d really like to stay within the $5,739 budget (Social Security + Fidelity drawdown + leftover money from the low-cost winter months) I figure will cover me during the long, hungry summer. To do that, I see I’m going to have to revise my budget…mightily downward.

There’s not a thing I can do about the $1,240/month nondiscretionary budget: the utility bills aren’t going away, and they can’t go unpaid. And while during the winter costs came in way under that budget because utilities were low, this summer they probably will bust the budget. The highest bills will hit in August, when payment for July water and electric use comes due; I expect those costs to exceed the $125 and $225 I’ve budgeted for them, respectively. Last August I had a $257 power bill, and the utility company is socking us with an 8%+ increase this year.

The only part of the budget with any give at all is for nondiscretionary spending: food, household expenses, clothing, vet bills, dental bills, gasoline, yard and house repairs, and everything else.

After I was laid off, I cut that budget from $1,500 to $800 a month. So far, so good: since Canning Day, I’ve managed to stay on track every month but May, when I had to pay for the glasses and the clothing extravaganza.

Now the plan is to cut discretionary spending from $800 to $500.

Fifty-seven hundred and thirty-nine dollars—the amount I have to see me through the summer—amounts to $1,830 a month when prorated over the whole summer. But $1,240 nondiscretionary costs plus $800 discretionary spending come to a total $2,040 in monthly spending: a $210/month shortfall.

So, I figure if I can cut $300 a month from the discretionary budget, there should be enough to get by until teaching income returns. Even if I don’t reach that goal—which I probably won’t, because it’s pretty extreme and because every time you’re short of money every damn thing in sight breaks and the dog gets sick—if I can come close, I’ll make it through the summer without eating very far into the emergency fund.

Wow! A $300-a-month budget cut! How do I plan to accomplish this?

• Cut back on food. The beans are already soaking in the slow cooker’s crock pot. I have some beef in the freezer, a fair amount of frozen fish and shellfish, a lifetime supply of pasta, a giant container of rice, and a stack of canned salmon in the pantry. I will need to buy some fresh produce and dairy, but otherwise I mostly can get by for a month or two by eating what’s on the shelves and in the freezer.

• Conserve gasoline. I’m trying not to use the car except on the once-weekly day I have to schlep to the campus to for a course preparation meeting. On that day, I’ll do grocery shopping and any other errands that are along the homeward trail.

• Buy nothing other than food unless it absolutely can’t be avoided. No clothes, no booze, no gardening stuff, no meals out, no electronic doodads, no movies, no nothin’.

• Find free ways to entertain myself. This includes hikes, long doggy walks, swimming, TV (broadcast, o’course) and freebie video downloads, and socializing with friends.

{sigh} It’ll be a challenge. That’s about the best I can say for it.

Beans-soaking

And Now for Something Completely Different…

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Nótt (Night) astride her steed Hrímfaxi

Midnight. It’s been a long day and a rough evening. Finish working around 11 p.m. but don’t feel like going to bed so am cruising the Web, wasting time into the wee hours.

Doesn’t sound very auspicious, does it?

Well. No, it wasn’t. Closing in on one in the morning, I decide to shut down the computer. It’s running slower and slower, and besides, I can’t keep my eyes open much longer. Too many programs are up, so I’m closing Excel and Word and Acrobat Professional (where did that come from?) and Grab and Preview and  iPhoto and Firefox… and… all of a sudden the iMac has a Big Mac Attack!

Suddenly the screen is bloated like it ate too many Big Macs, and it squiggles around when I move the mouse. The mouse being tireder than I am, its scroll wheel doesn’t work and for a while I can’t get any response to any clicks.

Finally it starts to function but the fat screen is still bobbing around, waltzing to the rodent’s tune. Shut down. Reboot. No difference.

Shut down. Unplug. Wait for awhile. {it’s getting later and later…} Reboot. No improvement.

Now I’m thinking

a) what is this? The behavior is so weird I don’t even know what it’s called! and
b) godammit, now on top of the two meetings and lunch tomorrow (which is not tomorrow but actually now only a few hours later today) I’m going to have to tote this machine into the Apple store and what is that going to cost me and why do these things invariably happen when i’m broke and the damn pool equipment is broke, too?????

Shut down and figure I’d better go to bed, and then I think uh oh! When did I back all that trash up, anyway?

Boot back up. Time passes. Hours, I’m sure. The machine reboots sloooooowwwwlleeeeeeeee. Finally everything comes back up. Save three vast directories to the external hard drive. More hours pass, or so it seems. Long, very very long minutes, anyway.

As the world turns, I think…there’s gotta be a way. So, google enlarged + screen + moving. Hey. What else do I have to do at two in the morning?

Mirabilis! This delightful site comes up! About two years ago, the Design Watchdog encountered the same problem with her Mac. She being cleverer than I, she managed to figure it out:

The screen gets fat and wobbly when you hold down the Command key and scroll upward with the Mighty Mouse. (Well…I don’t recall even having my hands on the keyboard, much less depressing Command while fooling with the rodent.) The solution, says she, is to hold down Command and scroll down.

Hm. So I try that.

The scroll button on the Apple rodent hasn’t worked properly in years, almost since I bought it. The thing runs sometimes, sometimes not. In the wee hours? Not.

Undaunted, I retrieved a Microsoft Mobile Mouse from another room. Loaded its gadget into a USB port, told the Mac to quit bellyaching, and soon had it running.

And yes: hold down command and scroll downward, and the screen promptly returns to normal!

Was that a relief! Thanks, Trisha!

Well, of course by then I was too keyed up to go back to sleep so explored Watchdog‘s site (check out this Mighty Mouse hack) and then ambled off on roads leading away into the virtual forest from her place. You know how that goes. You arrive at places and have no idea how you got there.

This is amazing. Bizarrely entertaining, is what I’d say: who knew watching some guy enter code (like he spoke it from infancy) to create a web design would be fascinating? Run the video at “Click on how you can design a website with Thesis” (which  yes, the guy appears to be selling). It’s a pretty long production, yet strangely interesting.

Moving on, at The Nerdist, don’t even think about stumbling off to bed before checking out this dissertation. And read the comments: in the “Who Knew” department, somewhere there’s a Costco that roasts its own coffee!

And naturally I couldn’t go to sleep without reading this mouthwatering recipe for cowboy beans (more like caballero beans, actually), being on poverty rations for the time being. Glorioski! Suddenly I don’t feel deprived at-tall.

Well, maybe sleep-deprived. After three hours of Z’s, it was out the door for a long and full day. Now it’s 8:20 at night, I just sat down to the keyboard, and neither the dog nor I have eaten.

And so, to dinner.

Image: Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831-1892), Nótt riding Hrímfaxi. Public Domain.

Shopping around…

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Leslie’s, the pool company I love to hate and hate to love, annoyed me again yesterday afternoon with its ridiculous prices.

They propose to charge $75 to fix Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, whose wing sheared off when he hit the loose drain cover that the Leslie’s guy didn’t bolt on correctly. Given that I have exactly zero teaching income this summer and am in the process of cutting my monthly discretionary budget from $800 to $500 (or less, if I can manage it), seventy-five bucks was not about to flow from my wallet into Leslie’s coffers. Thanks, but I can vacuum the pool manually.

Problem is, though, thanks to Gov. Jan Brewer and the Band of Bigots at the legislature, all the Mexican palm tree trimmers are hiding out or deported. There are no gringo palm tree trimmers, to speak of: it’s a dangerous, dirty, hard job for which homeowners are accustomed to paying very little. Just now, for three blocks around my house only two yards have their trees trimmed—in the middle of June!

The palm trees are in full bloom, and they’re dropping billions of noxious little sharp-edged, pool-equipment-clogging blossoms and debris into the water. There are four Mexican palms out there. Gerardo the Lawn Dude is not answering the phone—he may be living in Mexico, too, these days. And I’m afraid to even ask the arborist how much he’d charge to climb up there and trim them. If he’d even do it (he probably would not), he’d no doubt charge seventy-five or a hundred dollars bucks apiece. Just now, I’m not willing to part with several hundred dollars of my emergency cushion. Not unless it’s for a real emergency. It doesn’t look like the palm trees are going to get cleaned up. Nor is Harvey going to get fixed anytime soon.

So, I had in mind to buy one of those in-line leaf canisters, figuring it wouldn’t cost much to plug the thing in to the vacuum hose, where it would run interference for the pump pot and spare some wear and tear on the pump itself while I’m manually vacuuming up the litter. It’ll mean I’ll have to vacuum the pool about every day this summer. But beggars can’t be choosers.

Leslie’s want’s $99 for one of these little guys. At $78, Amazon is underpricing Leslie’s. Not only that, but you can acquire a brand-new one here for the cost of refurbished at Amazon. Or so they say. So, I suppose I’m going to have to kill some time driving around the city searching for something like this. Tomorrow I’ll pass a Home Depot on the way home from campus, assuming I choose to drive the surface streets.

A much smaller one can be had for just $37, but given the amount of crud that drops into the pool, I suspect I’ll be needing the larger size. Something called the Aqua Superstore is selling the big one for a mere $64, but this outfit appears to exist mostly online.

{sigh} i can’t afford this…

If the feds don’t override Arizona’s draconian anti-Mexican law (and let’s be frank: it’s Mexicans we’re talking about…few illegal Canadians get picked up in Sheriff Joe’s dragnets), then I guess I’ll have to take the palm trees out. I hate to do that—they’re probably as old as the house, very tall and stately. And nothing else can go into the narrow strip of soil between the pool walls and the block fencing. But I sure can’t afford what white guys charge, nor do I care to deal with the class of men that I’ve run into in that category. The last time I hired gringos, they got into the garage and stole my tools.

Oh, no…wait! That was the pair before the clown who got mad when the German shepherd went after him because he was trying to break into the yard of the old house by jimmying the RV gate. Holy mackerel! I’d put that scumbag out of my mind. He came back after he knew I’d left and vandalized the trees in my backyard—one of the neighbors saw him re-entering the yard. Ripped about a third of the canopy down off the fig tree, and pulled a big limb off one of the ashes. The fig tree never recovered.

They’re just not guys you want to have around. If I can’t find Mexican workers, I’ll do the yard work myself and cut down everything I can’t take care of on my own. That’ll be quite a lot, because I’m too old to thrash around in 100-degree heat.

Guess I can shop around all I want…no matter what, I can’t afford to underwrite the consequences of the haters’ fear of immigrants.