Coffee heat rising

w00t! w00t! and w00-h00-h00t!!!

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Power lines

OMG! Who would ever think it possible for a person to be thrilled by a power bill? The electric bill just arrived in the mail: only $187.04!!!!!!!

In freaking JULY! It defies belief!

I’m budgeted for $225 in the summer months. Last July the bill was $176.63, but that was with the old unit cranked up to 82 during the day and 78 at night. It was very, very uncomfortable in the house. Some of my friends refused to come into the house at all last summer, not wanting to be invited to sit and stay awhile.

This summer, having a few more dollah to spare, I’ve run it at an unheard-of 76 during the night and kept it at 80 in the daytime hours. While 80 is a little warm when you’re in an enclosed space, the new AC unit has kept the house relatively comfortable. And it has exactly reversed the relative comfort zones that characterized the old unit. The decrepit Goettl kept the front part of the house fairly comfortable but left the bedrooms roasting hot. This Goodman unit, set at 80, keeps the bedrooms at around 81 and lets the kitchen and family room slide up to a cozy 84. Since I’d rather be cool enough at night to have a shot at sleeping than end up lying on the living-room tiles trying to get a few z’s, the new arrangement is just fine by me.

For the bill to go up just 11 dollars is pretty amazing, especially considering that the power company raised the rates by 4.9 percent. I expected to see a $300 tab, which is exactly what I would’ve had if I’d tried pushing the thermostat down to 76 with the old machine. Since $176.63 + 4.9% = $185.28, what it means is that the new unit’s improved efficiency is allowing me to keep the house almost comfortable without a real increase in cost. If the hailstorm hadn’t brought me a new unit, free from heaven, I’d be sweltering all summer for the same amount I’m paying to ratchet it down to 76 at night.

Last August the bill was $239.08, so I expect we could see a $250 bill next month. But with this month’s bill coming in $38 under budget, I can afford it. 🙂

Image: High-voltage lines in Washington State. Jeffrey G. Katz. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Bottomless Job Application

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Spent something over half the day filling out a job application: Scottsdale Community College is advertising a one-year-only full-time position in its English, Languages, and Journalism department.

These OYO positions often morph into permanent tenure-track jobs, or so I’m told. One way or the other, I could do with a full-time salary, even if it’s just for a year. Sixty-five or seventy grand would go a long way toward recovery from the layoff.

Things are getting better, although “better” is a tenuous state of affairs. Just now I have about $210 to live on for the rest of the month, and the rest of the month is a LONG time.

So I suppose it was worth starting at 10 a.m. and plodding through to 6:00 p.m. filling out forms, revamping the endless CV, and writing an intricate cover letter. The applications for these jobs are true monsters, page after page after page of tedious forms…not the least is the one where they ask you to list

every…

single…

college…

course…

you’ve…

ever…

taken…

from…

the…

first…

semester…

of…

your…

freshman…

year…

until…

the…

day…

you…

filed…

your…

Ph.D….

dissertation……  GAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

Fortunately, I had a copy of the very list, which I’d had to compile to apply for the munificent $2,400/semester courses an adjunct gets to teach. But even with pasting it into the application, getting all that stuff together and crafting what I hope is a convincing letter seemed to take forever.

Why they ask you to duplicate an application you already have on file with the District escapes me. But if that’s what they want, that’s what they’ll get. It’s so unlikely that they’re going to hire a 66-year-old woman into their plum job as to make spending time on this project downright ludicrous. On the other hand, any chance at all makes it worth an effort.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

 

Chase Bank Credit Card Frolic

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My little S-corporation has its own Chase Bank credit card, issued through the credit union. Well: make that “had.” Honestly, I don’t know why state agencies and credit unions do business with Chase: what a nuisance it is to deal with those huge, faceless banks. Chase has let my corporate credit card expire: no sign of a new card, no word from the bank…just notices from vendors who get paid by the card that they’re going to quit providing their various products and services because the card expires this month.

So yesterday I gathered all my psychological reserve of patience and plunged into Chase’s telephone punch-a-button maze. After a lengthy, aggravating wait spent listening to advertising pumped into my ear, a 20ish-sounding CSR got on the phone. Jumped through hoop after hoop after hoop with her, delivering every personal piece of identifying data the bank’s telephone script-writers could dream up, and then, just as I was opening my mouth to ask why they haven’t renewed the card, she says, “The information you’ve given doesn’t match the information we have.”

Oh shit. I forgot: When they ask “What is your date of birth,” they mean “What date was your company incorporated.”

So I say, “Hang on, I’ll have to get into my file and pull out the incorporation papers.”

“No,” says she, “Once I’ve entered your answers, I can’t enter any other answer.”

Say what?

You don’t get a second chance, if you’ve made a mistake in saying who and what you are. Just to get to the point where I would have the privilege of asking my question, now I have to waste another 15 minutes plodding through their FLICKING PUNCH-A-BUTTON MAZE AGAIN!

I just about went ballistic.

“All right, then,” said I. “Let’s just cancel the card.”

Of course, there was nothing she could do in that direction, either, because according to her records, the card was issued to a person who is two years old. And that, obviously, wasn’t me.

What excuse is there to treat customers like that?

So, I called the New York Times, which extracts its monthly subscription fee through that card, and switched them to American Express.

Then wrote to the customer disservice address on the Chase bill and told them to cancel the card (and yes, I do know that’s a hit on the corporation’s credit report, and I don’t care!!!!). Next, wrote a dear-sir-you-cur to the president of the credit union, enclosing the rant to Chase detailing what happened and suggesting the credit union might want to deal with some other rapacious organization:

Sam Wheeler
Chairman
Arizona State Credit Union
2355 W. Pinnacle Peak Rd.
Phoenix, AZ 85027

Dear Mr. Wheeler:

I’m canceling my corporate credit card, which is associated with my business account at the credit union, for the reasons described in the attached letter.

This is the second extremely annoying runaround I’ve had from Chase. Prior experience shows the customer service representatives and management at the credit union are helpless to intervene with Chase, so I have not bothered them this time.

You know, Mr. Wheeler, the reason I do business with a credit union is specifically so that I will not have to do business with despotic monoliths like Chase Bank.

I will find another credit-card vendor for The Copyeditor’s Desk. Since my credit is sterling, I expect no problem will arise. But I would suggest that the credit union has a problem: it’s called “Chase.” You might want to consider finding a better organization with which to ally the credit union, one that will not jack members around.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, (etc.)

And finally, speaking of outfits that call its customers “members,” it was off to Costco, where I learned to my delight that even though I have the low-rent business membership, Costco will indeed issue a second American Express card to me, set up in the name of my business.

Even though, as Free Money Finance recently noted, Costco’s AMEX card is cutting its benefits, it still provides a substantial kickback on the kinds of purchases I usually make. Most of what I purchase on the S-corp’s card is office supplies, and what AMEX is cutting is the 3 percent kickback on restaurant meals. IMHO, a 1 percent difference on something I rarely buy is hardly worth canceling a card with a company that does provide pretty fair customer service.

Costco’s AMEX card kicks back 3 percent on gasoline, which, when combined with Costco’s low prices, is pretty respectable. The Costco near me consistently provides the lowest prices within reasonable driving distance, and AMEX is the only credit card their pumps will take. Although some cards will give you 5 percent back, they also are issued by despotic monoliths. I’d rather deal with just one monolith, thank you.

In the near future, I’ll be charging about $3,000 in computer equipment on this new American Express card. So, at 2 percent, that will generate a $60 rebate, right out of the hustings.

Chase owes The Copyeditor’s Desk a few pennies in customer reward kickbacks. Unlike AMEX, they don’t just send you a check.  You have to screw around and jump through hoops to get it. I’ve never bothered, since it’s loose change. No doubt I’ll never see that money. Such as it was.

 

The Wages of Weak Education

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Lordie! Have you seen Free Money Finance’s gasp of astonishment at the latest revelation of Americans’ stunning ignorance of things financial?

Really, it’s just a hint: three surprisingly simple questions that require one to think logically, in a very vague way, about interest, inflation, and investing. Only 30 percent of 1,488 adults could answer all three “duh!” questions correctly, and less than half could answer the two that addressed interest and inflation. Amazingly, only half could say whether ’tis better to have all your financial eggs in one basket or to diversify a bit.

FMF concludes, as do a large number of his commenters, that the nation needs “a big dose of financial education.”

Probably so.

Some of FMF’s readers think the 70 percent of survey respondents were “stupid,” no “smarter than a fifth-grader,” and “the ‘greater fools’ that allow bubbles to happen.”

Now that, I doubt. The community college students I teach are exactly the sorts who would get these answers wrong: people whose K-12 training left something to be desired, or folks for whom academics weren’t a top priority until they realized they need a degree to get a decently paying job. They may not be well educated, but neither are they stupid. Many are very smart, indeed.

This very morning I spoke with a young man and one just verging on middle age, as we stood in the hall waiting for our classroom to clear out. The subject of debt, savings, and the cost of living came up. As they spoke, it became clear that neither man could even conceive of ever earning enough to have something to put aside for the future. The reason that’s so is not that they’re stupid or “greater fools,” but that they’re undereducated.

When almost half of some 1,500 adults can’t tell that $100 invested at 2 percent a year would amount to more than $102 after five years, the problem is that they can’t do the most basic arithmetic. It means something like half of Americans don’t understand decimal fractions or simple multiplication.

There’s stupidity at work, all right. But it’s not among the current generations. The stupidity is on the part of leadership that hasn’t been competent to build and maintain a decent public school system. This is a direct cause of the naïveté that led American consumers to be gulled into buying suspect and downright bogus financial instruments, the very instruments that led to the late crash and the present endless recession. And frankly, if what’s going on in my state is any indication, I don’t see an end of stupidity in sight.

Clean-up Day

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The late great dust storm left an astonishing mess. And nice timing: The day I bring home 150 student papers to grade (yes!), I get distracted by a good four hours of shoveling mud out of the pool, two trips to the pool shop to keep Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner staggering along (to the tune of $70), an hour of scraping dust up off the floors…my god.

I’m so tired I’m physically sick.

It’s 9:30, I have another 75 papers to read between now and 6:15 tomorrow morning, and I give UP. There’s just no way I’m going to get through all that stuff.

Decided to opt dusting the furniture (and the baseboards, and the walls, and the cabinetry, and the appliances, and the lampshades, and the fans, and…) in favor of microfiber-ragging up the tiles and vacuuming the garage floor, since they were gritty underfoot. There’s so much dust in the air, it will take several days for it to settle out. But settle it will: all over the furniture, the baseboards, the walls, the etc.

So much dirt is still hanging in the atmosphere that, as I was driving up to campus this morning, it was shrouding the hilltops like fog or low-flying clouds. But neither fog nor cloud is what this stuff is. If you linger outdoors, a layer of fine, scratchy grit settles on your skin. Work up a sweat (as I spent the entire afternoon doing), lick your lips, and along with the salt you get a mouthful of crunchy stuff.

So I figured it would be better to just wait until it all settles out than to clean and then have to clean again.

But the pool: that had to be dealt with. What a mess!

Looked like someone had dumped about half a wheelbarrow of dirt in there. Mud rippled across the bottom like sand at the seashore, dusted the walls, piled up in a dune at the deep end.

Started working at dawn, as soon as there was just enough light to grope around. So much dirt lay on the bottom that I didn’t see the wads of devil pods under there. Ran the pump long enough to skim off the floating debris; then pulled out the skimmer basket, dipped Harvey in the drink, and plugged him in.

Took about 10 minutes to bring him to a dead stop. And to push the filter’s pressure gauge to 22 psi.

Backwashed, recharged the filter. Pulled Harvey out and found he was gagging on devil pods and strappy leaves. Put him in the back of the car.

On the way home from the interminable classes, took him by Leslie’s. The manager discombobulated him, cleaned him out, replaced a gear box (which I doubt needed to be replaced…I don’t trust that guy), and charged me $70. Another unexpected, unaffordable little surprise bill.

Back at the house, attached the bonnet to the garden hose, sucked all the pods and other debris off the bottom, put a spray attachment on the hose and swept down the walls as best as I could, reattached the rejuvenated Harvey. He waddled s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y across the bottom, barely moving. Something wrong, but not having time to think about it, decided to let him run a few hours while I graded papers.

Read one batch. Looked back out there: Harvey is at another dead stop.

Haul him out of the pool, schlep him back to Leslie’s. Guy says there’s really nothing wrong with Harvey that another $90 repair wouldn’t fix. He says probably the filter is clogged and needs to be backwashed.

I say I’ve already backwashed this morning.

He says one of his customers had to backwash three times.

Shit.

I plod back to the house. PSI is only 12 pounds or so…about normal. The filter does not need to be backwashed.

So I attach the manual vacuum to the hose, after engaging in a lengthy fight with the in-line leaf catcher, one of the most annoying inventions known to pool-going humankind. Clog the vacuum hose. Get it working. Takes about an hour to vacuum the mud off the walls and floor.

By then, yes, the filter indeed is straining again.

Backwash thoroughly. Run and run and run the water into the alley until it finally starts to run clean.

By now I’ve drained the pool almost to the skimmer basket. When I go to pour some DE in there to recharge the filter, the pump starts to cavitate.

Shit, shit, shee-ut!

Abort, abort abort! Shut down the pump before it sucks too much air in. Drop the hose in the pool and let it run full-bore, about 45 minutes.

Fire up the pump again. Bleed off the air. It’s running OK…at 15 PSI.

Ducky.

This means that before long (as in probably less than a week) the Leslie’s service dude is gonna have to come out here and take the whole damn thing apart, haul the heavy filter out to the alley, deconstruct it, wash all the filter pads (illegally in the alley), put it all back together, and recharge it.

I just had that done a month ago. It costs $120. One shouldn’t have to do that kind of procedure more often than every six months to a year.

So now we have $120 + $70; that would be another $190 this month, on top of the various other unexpected nasty bills that are rolling in while I have no income.

All told, I’d say I worked about four hours cleaning the pool, starting at 4:30 a.m. An hour on the house. Four hours of standing in front of a classroom starting at 7:00 a.m. Ninety minutes or two hours driving back and forth and dickering with the Leslie’s store. And I didn’t keep track of the time spent reading the 75 papers I’ve managed to get through.

Ugh. Life in Paradise!

More freakish weather

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Incredible dust storm whipped through here last night. If it were sand and not fine, sifting dust, hot and not cool, I’d say it was  just like the shamals we used to get in the Saudi Arabian desert. The heat dropped a good 20 degrees as the dust moved through. It’s down to 80 right now.

Turn off your sound before clicking on the video above; the TV station inflicts a particularly annoying, noisy ad on viewers before letting you get at the images. Here’s a more polite video by an amateur photographer, but shorter and without the awesome sky photos.

The storm hit the suburbs to the south of us around 7:00 p.m., while it was still light out. An hour or so later, M’hijito remarked, over the phone, that a gigantic wall of something was bearing down on us; by then it wasn’t obvious by looking at the storm front that it was dust. A few minutes later, though, it sure was! When I peeked out the front door, I literally could not see the houses across the street!

Here it is again moving through one of those ghettos for families with kids in the East Valley:

Ugh. So much for having spent six and a half hours cleaning house the day before yesterday. Everything—every piece of furniture, every square inch of flooring, every windowsill, every baseboard, every piece of decorative trim on the woodwork—is coated with dust. This morning both classes are unloading a ton of work on me, so there’ll be no time to clean house. About the best I’ll be able to manage will be to pull Harvey out of the pool and dump in some extra chlorine. And backwash. Again.

Doesn’t look like much debris fell in the drink, though. It’s just cloudy with dust. At this hour—3:45 in the morning—I can’t see much out there. Will have to wait until 5, I guess, to get to work on that project.

Whee. Why do I live in this place, again?