We’re told, through a listserv published for community college district adjuncts, that the policy for adjunct faculty is to be rabidly enforced. We are NOT TO BE TEACHING more than three sections a semester.
Interestingly, that appears to include summer sessions. That is, your summer session time is counted in to your academic-year teaching hours, somehow, through the magic of accounting sleight-of-hand. You get a few extra hours beyond 20 per week per semester, but that would allow you to take on only one course in the summer. If you teach any more than that (this summer, I have two), you will be forced into the state pension plan, in which there is no chance you will ever become vested (you have to work for the State of Arizona or Maricopa County for 10 years to become vested!).
Your “contribution” to the state pension plan is 11.13%. In other words, if you dare to take on one course too many, if you perform any substitute teaching, or if you serve on any committees, you get an 11.3% pay cut. Thus your unpenalizable salary is kept rigidly low, and you are smartly punished if you make a mistake.
Now… Each time a contract ends—which happens at the end of each term—you are considered “terminated” from state service. Therefore, you can fill out forms and jump through hoops and demand that the “contribution” be refunded to you.
Thus it’s not exactly a pay cut.
It’s less of a pay cut if you’re over 57½, because once you’ve reached the age at which you’re permitted to take drawdowns from tax-deferred savings, you may take out the money without a penalty from the feds.
If you’re too young to take out money from a tax-deferred plan, then the only way to hang on to what you’ve earned is to roll it over into an IRA.
Well, of course…you wouldn’t be working for $2,400 a semester if you didn’t need the cash flow, and need it in a big way. So what this amounts to is a nice little shafting and another tool to keep adjuncts down.
Since I can get the money back at the end of each semester, it won’t much matter to me. As long as my chair can get away with it, I’ll take on two summer courses and just let the SOBs confiscate 11.13% of my pay; then take it back when I’m “terminated” at the end of each semester. For me, it will just mean another helping of bureaucratic hassle.
It still will provide enough to pay my share of the mortgage on the downtown house, plus a few extra dollars to help make ends meet. I sure could do without having to fill out more forms and argue with more bureaucrats, though. Gawd, how I hate that!
Sometimes you feel like you can’t win for losin’. You just get to the point where you think you’ve got the finances under control, you figure you can finally cope, and wham! Another annoying little surprise whaps you upside the head.
Just got my first summer paycheck—about $600 net for the first week of teaching. It’s not much, but it’s one heckuva lot better than nothing.
Some time ago I estimated that I’d net about $3600 from the two sections I’m teaching this summer. Six hundred of that would go to help cover the June through August utility bills, which I expected to soar because I made the conscious decision to set the thermostat at a comfortable level now that a tiny bit of income is flowing in over the 115-degree summer. The rest, about three grand, would be folded back into the mid-term survival fund, putting off the date I’ll have to draw down retirement investments by about three months.
Things look a shade better than planned: if the $600 is for one week, as appears to be the case according to the PeopleSoft statement, then the 2½ more paychecks they’ll owe me this summer should net just about $3,000. However, thanks to the new AC unit, the June utility bill did not exceed my regular monthly budget—although it remains to be seen what will happen when the July bill comes in next month. But even one month of not having to pay astronomical power and water bills preserves some of that $600.
So. I’m thinking, wow! What to do with this vast lucre?
Could I (can you imagine?) actually spend it on something I’d like to have or do? I would so much like to take my dear and constant friends, La Maya and La Bethulia, out for a wonderful dinner on the town. But I can barely take myself out to dinner at Taco Bell, much less treat friends to a gourmet feast at the Barrio Cafe. I still need clothes. The Sanitas clogs I bought a year or so ago and wear constantly are about shot—they really need replacing. Six hundred bucks might allow me to do all three of those things!
Well. No.
Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner
Harvey’s still not working. That’ll be another $90 for further repairs, bringing the total cost to get him running to about half the cost of a new Hayward pool cleaner.
And then, to frost the cake, the pool system is sucking air from somewhere during its shut-down time. When it comes on after having rested overnight, great bubbles of air belch out of the inlets.
That, my friends, is what we call “not a good sign.” Very possibly…indeed, the operative term is “probably”…there’s a leak in the plumbing somewhere.
Don’t even ask how much that’s going to cost to fix. Just say good-bye to the $600, and then some.
Yes, I do have an emergency fund. As we know, each month we should put a few bucks aside for these little contingencies, and I have the credit union automatically transfer two hundred bucks a month into said fund; anything left at the end of a month also goes into that emergency account. Problem is, the contingencies have been coming hot and heavy, and every one of them has cost a helluva lot more than $200: the dental bills; the car repair; the shingles shot that wasn’t covered by Medigap or Medicare; the doctor’s visit that wasn’t covered by Medigap or Medicare; and on and on. Each cost ran significantly more than the $200 monthly deposit.
This means the emergency fund has steadily been shrinking. There’s only about $1,700 left in there. It may not be enough to cover the cost of pool repairs, if the problem is what I fear it is. That means yet another big bill will have to be paid from mid-term survival savings. Instead of extending the time I can live on the survival fund as summer pay goes into it, that pot may actually shrink because of this month’s adventures. And the extra income earned from working like an animal all summer won’t help.
One of the things that’s given to crapping out when I least need yet another unplanned bill (which is just about any time, come to think of it) is Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner.
Leslie’s has a perennial “sale” on those things, which is to say that their regular price is about $75 less than you’d pay if you ordered it online. Tax on the retail price would be about $33, leaving one with a small saving if one bought the critter there.
I’m thinking I should buy a new pool cleaner, using survival savings for the purpose (since I’ll have to rob that fund anyway for the upcoming gouges). Then go ahead and get Harvey fixed, too. This would give me two of these gadgets that function.
So, if one of them dies at a moment when I can’t afford a repair bill, it won’t matter. I can attach the other one and let it run until I can afford to get the invalid fixed.
This would give me a little more control over the surprise bills. Not much, of course, but some.
LOL! By that logic, I could control car repair bills by spending 20 grand on a new car and keeping the Dog Chariot as a back-up vehicle. Must hurry out and buy one.
Seriously: Do you have a strategy to deal with unexpected costs when the costs exceed the amount you can afford to set aside in your emergency fund?
Not for certain yet… It was on the late side of mid-afternoon when I drove into the neighborhood and spotted a BIG-a$$ Bekins truck parked out in front of the house where the late, great crime occurred. Whichever way the movers were going, they were about done, and so there was no action. So I couldn’t see whether they were carrying things in or out. But because several brand-new, unused boxes were leaning against the front of the house, my guess is she’s moving out and those were boxes she was returning to Bekins. Or boxes the movers were going to use to pack up her stuff.
A bright red FOR RENT sign was stuck in the front yard. Why would the landlord have a for-rent notice out there if the tenants were moving in?
Cruised by the house a couple of times, as unobtrusively as possible, which wasn’t very. Came home, put the groceries away, let the dog out, changed my clothes, idled a few minutes away. Then I rode my bike down there, through the 109-degree heat, to see if a slower, closer look would resolve the question.
By then, the truck had left. It looked like the house was vacant! Of course, I was afraid to charge right up to the front windows and peer in. But I do think SHE’S GONE!!!!!!!
I’ll drive by there tonight after dark. If there’s no light in there, then maybe I’ll be emboldened to barge up and look in the windows tomorrow.
Wow! How awesome would that be, if she really were gone?
Cassie and I would get our favorite evening walk route back. It’s the best after-dark doggie-walk trail through the neighborhood, because it doesn’t go near the park, which isn’t very safe at night, and because it doesn’t cross the main north-south feeder street, taking us further afield than one would like to be on foot at 10 or 11 p.m. This route passes several really beautiful homes, borders a horse property where the burros come up and kiss Cassie on the nose, and goes through a lush, quiet neighborhood full of mature trees and cool, irrigated lawns. All these things make it the closest desirable place to walk, day or night.
I haven’t taken Cassie back there, of course, and was resolved never to walk anywhere near that house again. That meant we couldn’t go into that part of the neighborhood at all, since we have to pass that house to get into the enclave to the south of it.
LOL! She must have called the landlord, told him there was a crazy woman in the area, and demanded to be let out of the lease. Heeeeeee!
Whatever: good riddance. Now we’re free to walk anywhere in the neighborhood we please.
Update
Bicycling past the house early Sunday morning, I saw a vehicle parked in the driveway. Damn! She must have been moving in, not out. Doesn’t matter, I guess…Cassie now refuses to walk in a southerly direction from our house, anyway.
Did knocking off the sauce (again :roll:) make it happen? Not likely. About once every six months I jump back on the wagon for a few weeks, and it never changes the scale reading. Besides, I don’t think one or two glasses of wine, beer, or bourbon and water really is that far over the top.
The weight loss has occurred, in fact, over just the past week or so, after I decided to experiment with my daddy’s favorite folk diet: cut out all starch.
By “starch,” he meant bread, potatoes, rice, cereals, and pasta.
LOL! In the good old days, they didn’t eat much of what we would call “pasta.” It would never have crossed my parents’ minds to serve a big bowl of spaghetti topped with fresh chopped tomatoes, basil, and shredded Parmesan. Spaghetti, to their generation of Americans, was some kind of ethnic food that entailed a full day of simmering a gloppy red sauce. Macaroni was served with cheddar cheese and white sauce. And noodles were to be smothered in rich beef, pork, or chicken gravy, preferably with cream added.
Yum. If it were just a little cooler (say, about 50 degrees cooler…) I sure could do with some of my mother’s beef strogonoff over noodles.
Well, anyway. As soon as I quit eating “starch,” the weight started to drop.
We could say this is a modified Atkins diet. Actual, real Atkins, it is not. On My Daddy’s Diet, you’re allowed to eat anything you want except “starch” and desserts loaded with refined sugar (pie and cake, for example, would be nixed, but plain strawberries or peaches would be OK). Atkins wants you to stay off sweet, juicy, delicious fruits (at least at the outset) and certain kinds of veggies dubbed too high in carbs.
Sorry, Dr. A, but I wasn’t about to let the candy-sweet watermelon and the Costco flat of astonishing peaches in the fridge go to waste. So I’ve been blithely scarfing down two or three peaches a day, and as much as a quarter of a watermelon.
And I still lost weight!
Atkins also wants you to kick not just your alcohol habit but your caffeine habit: he theorized that caffeine somehow interfered with your metabolism. Right, sure. Life’s miserable enough without a bourbon and water in the afternoon. I’ll be darned if I’m doing without my morning coffee and my all-day iced tea supply. Matter of fact, as we scribble I’m swilling down coffee with élan.
And I still lost weight!
Hot dang.
Daddy’s scheme allows you to eat pretty well, without making you feel unduly deprived. Come to think of it, I don’t feel in any way deprived…now and again I push away from the table feeling I ate altogether too much. It’s just a matter of finding something unstarchy to substitute for your favorite cereal and potato products. For me, it’s been lettuce, lots of lettuce. Cabbage is good, too.
Breakfast looked a little problematic. Though I don’t eat much cereal (hate the processed stuff, and am not crazy about gooey cooked cereal), I’ve long been in the habit of fixing two pieces of bacon, two slices of toast, and about a gallon (so it seemed!) of orange juice frappéed with frozen strawberries.
I substituted a couple of sweet, flavorful tomatoey Campari tomatoes for the toast. With so much fruit in the house, often I’ve scarfed down a large peach or slab of melon in place of the juice, which itself consists of one large glass of OJ blended with about four large berries and a drop of vanilla extract. There’s been plenty of fruit at breakfast: a few days I’ve had a peach and watermelon!
When I took it into my little pea brain to cook up a stir-fry, I was given pause. After all, isn’t the whole point of stir-fry to eat the rice soaked in soy sauce? Well, it was late at night and I sure didn’t feel like making a green salad, which didn’t sound very good with stir-fry, anyway, so I just added lots of veggies and tried it sans rice. It was delicious! It didn’t need rice at all to be highly wonderful. What’s an Asian word for sans?
{chortle!} I figure the initial poundage drop is the loss of bloat from drinking one or two bourbons and water a day. I rarely drink more than two, and they’re pretty watered-down, but still…they are alcohol, which when you come down to it is just another sugar, only even less benign than the white granulated stuff. The pot belly is still there, though the love handles are noticeably reduced.
Exercise? Not hardly! It’s been too hot to poke one’s nose outside the door this past month. By 10:00 p.m., when it’s marginally cool enough to walk around and the pavement won’t burn Cassie’s feet, I’m usually just too pooped to do much other than drag into bed.
This morning when I woke up at 5:00, though, it was an unheard-of seventy-five degrees out there! A brilliant full moon hovered over the western horizon like a hallucinatory alabaster plate floating in the sky.
Grabbed the dog and made a tour of the neighborhood (as far from the German shepherd hosts as possible). After we returned and Cassie was fed, it was still cool enough for me to pump up the bicycle tires and ride all over Richistan, just to the east of us. Then plunged in the pool before breakfast.
So I got a little exercise, certainly nothing very vigorous but better than nothing. And it’s not likely to happen again soon, because the brief cold snap we’re having is supposed to dissipate today.
But it’s only a little after nine, all that activity has been activated, the plants are watered, all the laundry is done, and the sheets are on the line. Dang! Not a bad kick-off for the day.
I’d like to lose another eight or ten pounds. Even though I’m back in the “normal” BMI range, which I’d managed to edge above, I believe about 140 is more like “normal” for a woman my height and age. What I hope to do is get down to 135, so that during the times of day when one weighs out at one’s heaviest, the scale would never read more than about 140. And if that actually comes to pass, which would surprise me, I think the only way to maintain it will be to stay off the sauce permanently and after this to refrain from dumping vast mounds of spaghetti on my plate.
Welp, speaking of mounds, a pile of student papers awaits. And so, to work…
Horrible evening and night. Along about 10 pm as we were walking in the neighborhood, some idiot’s out-of-control German shepherd dog charged across our main feeder street and down the side road where we were standing and attacked Cassie.
The shepherd belonged to the guests of some renters in a house on Feeder Street. This bunch were out in front of the house, apparently taking their leave of their hosts as they loaded stuff into the back of a small SUV. As we approached on Side Road, I could see they had a couple of dogs out there, one of them a shepherd, and that the shepherd was squirreling around their truck. I stopped to watch for a moment, but then decided we could get by since we were all the way on the other side of a wide road.
About the time we stepped forward from this pause—well before we reached the corner—this dog spotted us and shot across Feeder Street like a rocket. It grabbed Cassie by the nape of the neck and started shaking her, trying to kill her.
Wouldn’t you know, I’d decided to carry along a glass of tea instead of my coyote shilelagh, and I was wearing sandals, so couldn’t even kick the damn dog in the ribs.
I grabbed the shepherd but couldn’t force it to release her—she was shrieking and the shepherd was shaking her like a rag and I couldn’t stop it. Finally the moron owners came shuffling up, and the two of them were able to disconnect their fucking dog.
Effing morons! They claimed they had the dog on a leash. Yeah…they had a leash on the dog, all right: they just weren’t holding onto it! The animal was frolicking around the vehicle because they’d dropped the leash. I flew into such a high rage I turned the night air Day-Glo blue yelling at them for their stupidity.
Fortunately it was a fairly young dog, inexperienced, and it grabbed her not by the neck but over the shoulders. Her hair is extremely thick in that area and so the bite didn’t break the skin. By the time we got her free, she was ambulatory, and in fact did not want me to carry her far. She seemed to be able to walk OK, once I hauled her away from the scene.
The emergency vets tried to scare me, over the phone, into hurrying in for some expensive x-rays and tests, telling me she might have internal injuries. But I’m $450 in the hole as we scribble, no sign of my Social Security check, probably not going to get one next month, and after two weeks of entertaining freshmen four uninterrupted hours a day, tomorrow’s “lagging” paycheck from PeopleSoft will cover three, count’em (3) days. Since Cassie sleeps on the bed with me, I decided I could keep an eye on her until morning and then, assuming I didn’t have to rush her to the emergency animal clinic during the night, foist her onto La Maya to schlep to the vet while I was in class.
This morning she seemed sore but OK. So La Maya and I decided to opt the relay race to the vet’s, no doubt much to La M’s relief. Not as though she had nothing else to do… 🙄
From the campus, I made an appointment for 2:00 p.m. with the regular vet—fifty bucks just to walk in the door—but after arriving home from class I decided to cancel, because by the time I got home from class she was standing by the door and looking hale and hearty. Now she seems pretty well…bright-eyed and lobbying to chase her ball around. So I think she’s probably OK.
My throat is sore from all the screaming I did last night. Got to sleep around 3; had to get up at 5. I’ve been a zombie all day.
You know, if you own a big powerful dog that could pose a danger to you, to other people, or to other people’s pets, you have only two choices: either you have it so exquisitely, perfectly trained that it WILL stop what it’s doing under all conditions and come when called (few people know how or have the patience to train a dog like that), or you keep it on a lead at all times whenever it’s outside a fenced area.
Holy F**k! If you’ll excuse the not-quite expression. And even if you won’t, I’ll say it again.
About two seconds after I hit “send” to shoot four incredibly complicated documents off in application for a full-time job at the District, I went to close the short-form resumé I’d written to supplement the 12-page curriculum vitae, the 11-page application form, and the two-page (11-point Times New Roman, line spacing “exactly”) cover letter that I’ve spent the past three days laboring over.
The resumé was an afterthought. IMHO the endless CV is something that probably is never read and, if it is, probably is the target of much seething resentment on the part of the person who is forced to read it. So I thought it would be a good idea to send a two-page business-style resumé that, while it doesn’t detail every word I’ve ever published, every conference I’ve every attended, every class I’ve ever taught, and every thought I’ve ever had, is at least readable.
My fingers alight on Command-W just as my eyes come to rest on the screen, where what should I read as the file flickers away but
…a editorial office…
Oh, hell and damnation!
I spent hour after hour after HOUR trying to get this stuff right. Went over it and over it and over it and then went over it again. If I have to screw up, does it have to be, dear God, does it have to be right where I’m crowing about my brilliant editing career?
So, if I ever had a snowball’s chance (which of course I didn’t), it just melted away in the 110-degree heat.
I’m screwed.
And if the FARKING Republicans get their way and shut the government down, I (along with about half my fellow Americans) am double-screwed.
I do not know what I am going to do if I don’t get a Social Security check next month. And I’m quite sure I’m not the only person who does not know what she or he is going to do if we don’t get our Social Security checks last month.
So far, Social Security hasn’t deposited a payment this month, either. Yesterday I spent my last available cash-flow dime on food. To buy enough gas to get to work between now and the end of the credit-card cycle, I’ll have to pull more money out of savings.
My next paycheck, which will arrive on Thursday after I’ve been standing in front of classrooms for two weeks, will cover three days, thanks to PeopleSoft’s wacko “lagging” pay periods. It might, maybe, buy enough gas for another week of commutes to the campus.
Damn it. I’m ready to go to the barricades. Americans of good will need to riot in front of the offices of these crazy Republicans. We need to march on Washington. We need to stage sit-ins at every Republican senator and congressman’s office in the nation!
If those SOBs manage to cut off Social Security—which is exactly what they want to do—I will have to double my drawdown from savings, and that will just barely cover my living expenses. It will not cover the payments on the house that Zillow now says is worth $120,000 less than we’re paying for it. Doubling my drawdown will exceed the 4% recommended drawdown, by a long shot. My savings will not last the rest of my lifetime. Before I’m carted off to the nursing home, I will be flat broke and living on welfare—assuming the Republicans haven’t managed to get rid of that, too, as they wish they could. There will be nothing to leave to my son.
Most Americans have far less in retirement savings than I do. As retirees, they don’t have any extra money to draw down. Large numbers of formerly middle-class baby boomers will be left destitute long before it’s time for them to shuffle off this mortal coil. Because they will have no financial capital to pass to the next generation, their children will fall out of the middle class—assuming any of them are still there by the time their parents die.
We will not be left that way through any doing of our own—outside the coastal cities, most people simply do not earn enough to set aside upwards of a million dollars for retirement. And we will not be left that way through any misdoing of the average man and woman on the street, the ones who go to work and pay their bills and raise their kids in the time-honored American way. We will be left that way by a strategy to slash this country’s revenues by cutting taxes on the wealthy and on corporations that can easily afford to pay their share, by a decision to plunge our country into a ruinous war on the strength of a lie, by a bat-brained policy to deregulate the financial industry (and everything else that can be allowed to run loose across the land like so many wound-up mechanical rats), and by a nit-witted policy to resist raising taxes to fund the war built on a lie.
Something wicked this way comes, my friends. Matter of fact, it’s already here. It’s come for us, and it’s come for our kids.
Image: William Rimmer, Scene from Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I (witches conjuring an apparition). Public Domain.
