Coffee heat rising

Gunfire? Reconsidering the suburbs…

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Carol (accountant/neighbor right across the street) e-mailed to ask if I’d heard Sunday morning’s gunshot fusillade. She was awakened by the racket, too (for me, it was just another sleepless night; she actually has work she needs to be awake for), and she called the cops. They told her several other people had called in a shots-fired report.

Hm. I thought it was firecrackers. Our idiot legislators have legalized fireworks, and so every one of their fellow morons—and we have more than our share of those in this state—has run out and stocked up on every incendiary device one can now get one’s hands on. The Safeway, if you can imagine, is selling fireworks that will blow your fingers off and scorch your eyes blind. But by golly, we wouldn’t want Big Brother robbing our kids of a nostalgic childhood experience!

Oh. Sorry. Back on topic:

Firecrackers. Pretty Daughter‘s teenage kids were outside—I could hear them laughing when I got up to investigate. And an  unmuffled car with a boombox, exactly the description of Pretty Daughter’s girl child’s boyfriend’s vehicle, roared off down the street forthwith.

The gangbangers around here favor automatic and semiautomatic weapons. This was not one of those. If it was a gun, the person was using an old-fashioned six-shooter, and that is so unlikely in this neighborhood as to defy credibility. Also, the reports—about twenty of them—were not as sharp as pistol shots.

But Carol is pretty sure it was a gun. And Sally was up that night, too—her lights were on; she turned them off and apparently went back to bed after the dust settled. I imagine Sally, who’s been around the block a few times, also called 911.

Damn, but sometimes one tires of living in…shall we say, a socioecomically mixed neighborhood. Those slums west of 19th and north of Dunlap really do affect the quality of life in adjacent middle- and working-class neighborhoods. And as the economy slides deeper into actual depression for low-income workers, who now comprise the largest numbers of permanently unemployed Americans, the area to the west is getting worse and worse. Really, none of the grocery stores and other retail establishments that serve our neighborhood are safe to patronize now. The Albertson’s has been hopeless for a long time, but the Sprouts across the road from it used to be OK. Now I won’t go into either shopping center. The Ranch market has taken the place of the defunct Food City in serving the Latino population—it feels a little safer because most of the customers are families, and because the proprietors have hired a security guard to patrol the parking lot.

But really: who wants to do their grocery shopping under the gaze of an armed guard?

I love my house, I love my immediate neighborhood, and I love my life in the central city. BUT… Do I really want to spend my old age dodging bullets?

This brings me back to the possibility of buying one of the hugely devalued houses in the new tracts up against the White Tanks mountains. One thing you have to say about an old folks’ “community” (snark) in a new settlement occupied entirely by middle-class whites: not a lot of gunfire will be going on there. Consequently, not a lot of cop helicopters will be rending the quiet of the evening hours (you can set your clock by the 11:00 p.m. cop fly-by here).

I’d love to have a beautiful new house like the models out there. But on the other hand, how could I live without choir, without my friends, and without seeing my son at the drop of a hat? And how could I get by without enough adjunct teaching income to take up the financial slack?

By way of wasting time when I should be working, I tricked out a little pro-and-con analysis. Listed twelve items in favor of living in Trilogy and twelve agin’ it. Then assigned a value to each, according to how important it is to me, subjectively. The result was a little surprising:

I expected the point spread between the pro’s and the cons would be a lot wider, much heavier in favor of staying put where I’m as happy as I’m ever likely to get. But there’s only a four-point difference between the reasons to move out there and the reasons not to move out there.

Some items, of course, are huge: dodging automatic fire stacks up just as heavily as being able to see my son on short notice. Others are more ambiguous: I don’t consider a new house to be especially important, especially given the solid construction and pleasant ambience of the 40-year-old house I’m living in. To my mind, the absence of rambunctious, noisy teenagers is not necessarily a good thing; hence the relatively low “7” on the pro side.

Judging by these dozen criteria, it’s almost a toss-up whether I stay in the increasingly violent inner city or follow my kind to the Holsum Bread suburbs.

Realistically? I can’t afford to live out there. Certainly not while I’m tethered to the upside-down house M’hijito and I got ourselves into: to pay that bill, I have to have a job, and the only work I can hope to get is part-time adjunct community college teaching. There are no community colleges within sane driving distance of the White Tank mountains. Plus no matter how much “greener” construction might save on the utility bills, a $218/month homeowner’s association fee is out of the question.

Which, yea verily, brings us to the homeowner’s association. Notwithstanding phenomena like Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum (now mercifully replaced by the tidy accountants across the street), I do not want to live in an HOA. I like to hang my laundry on the line…the last thing I need is some supercilious association telling me I can’t put my sheets out on the back porch. Or, more to the point, that I have to spend $350 to $500 I can’t afford to replace a dryer I don’t really  need or, now, even want.

Guess I’m your basic trailer trash, eh? Looks like this is where I belong.

😉

iPad: Probably Not Now…

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Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad. Evan-Amos. Public domain.
Down the rabbit hole on an iPad

This morning we learn that Google has signed up the British Library to its digitization project: holdings published between 1700 and 1870 will be added to the 13 million books Google has already scanned. Much of this stuff is available free on the iPad.

{sigh} I had decided to reward myself for the crushing amount of work I just ground through by having The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., buy me an iPad. It would be handy for editorial and teaching work (to say nothing of serving as an incredible toy!), and I figured CED could afford the $25/month ATT connection. And with Skype or some such on it, the thing would function as a cell phone, too.

But when I went over to the Apple store on Saturday, they didn’t have the model I want, and their manager seemed less than enthusiastic about selling one to me. Basically he said that you have to keep coming back to the store to see if they have the desired iPad in—often to nail what you want, you have to go back several times a day! He suggested ordering it online.

Well. I don’t want to order it online. I want to see what I’m getting and ask questions of real human beings and read the paperwork before I walk off with it.

So, I guess I don’t really need that thing. I’ve managed to stumble through 66 years without it, and I expect I’ll live another 20 or 30 years without it.

The interruption in the drive to buy an iPad was just enough to raise the question: Is this a need or a want? And more to the point, can CED really afford the thing?

Answer to the first question: want.

Answer to the second: apparently not.

The delay in gratifying that want gave me time to reconsider the S-corp’s performance. And I see that because Adsense has been underperforming over the past few months, CE Desk is just barely earning enough to pay my sidekicks and cover the operating costs I’ve recently shifted onto its books.

Fortunately, a couple of new clients recently appeared at the door. And we’re supposed to start a big project management account in July. If we perform decently on that, there’s a good shot the project management thing will develop into steady, long-term work.

Tina is extremely good at project management—that is, as a matter of fact, what she does on her day job. She’s so good at it that the Chinese government is going to keep her on contract as managing editor of the huge international business management journal she runs through the Great Desert University, even after the GDU gives her its second shafting (they’re laying her off again). So, I’m expecting that she will take over management of this huge client and farm out the grunt work to me and our other sidekick. But…it could be awhile before we see actual work and pay come in from this enterprise.

At any rate, when you run a business you have to apply the same frugalist principles as you do in operating your personal finances. To wit: always ask if it’s a need or a want!

But darn. I really did want that gadget. Way to market a product, Apple!

We’ll revisit this question later in the year, when we see how 2011 shakes out. Which leads us to another rule in common between business and personal finance: never bet on the come. 😉

Image: Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad.
Evan-Amos. Public domain.

Ant Wars: The Battle of Kenmore

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Ant carrying an aphid

They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k!

The Ondts have begun their summer campaign, and we have engaged the first battle of the season. A Myrmidon battalion was spotted this afternoon, undertaking an attack on the refrigerator. It appeared they were trying to roll it out the back door.

Ant intelligence agents are telepathic. How else to explain their unerring knowledge of the human exhaustion level? Invariably, they launch their raids when the enemy is quivering on the edge of nervous collapse.

O.K., O.K. I admit it: I haven’t cleaned the kitchen floor in a week, and yeah, something that I don’t clearly remember rolled under the fridge a week or so ago, and no, I’m just not strong enough to move the refrigerator, and so yes, it was inevitable that eventually the ant trash removal brigade would show up sooner or later. But really. They could have picked a day that didn’t begin at 5:30 a.m. with backwashing the clogged pool filter followed by the surprise 6:15 appearance of Gerardo’s non-English-speaking palm tree dude followed by MORE pool-cleaning followed by a very busy day of racing around the city followed by a wrestling match with Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner in 110-degree heat. They know. They do know.

I laid waste to legions of the lady warriors, though. Home-made glass & tile cleaner (rubbing alcohol + water + ammonia) does them in when it’s sprayed directly over their little bodies. Must’ve killed 80 or 100 of them. Experience suggests, however, that for every ant that croaks over, two ants are waiting to take her place.

Mopped up the field of battle with a microfiber rag on a swiffer mop. Vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed, in hopes of picking up whatever flecks of food are on the floor. Then dust-mopped again. Then mopped with a hot solution of Simple Green.

This strategy seemed to beat them back.

Ah, but the night is young. Puny human efforts to vanquish the armies of the night, as we know, little avail us. I expect they’re still out there. Waiting.

Image: Ant carrying an aphid. Luisifer. vlastní fotografie. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Real Estate, 2011

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Yesterday KJG and I took it into our pretty little heads to spend the day looking at real estate. More specifically, we killed several hours touring the models at Trilogy, a Shea Homes tract in Vistancia, itself a sprawling development halfway to Las Vegas. Entertaining experience.

Prices have come down so far that I actually could afford a base house in one of the low-end models out there. Well. That’s assuming I put in no landscaping, no window coverings, and no furniture.

Some of the houses are very pretty—one thing you have to say for today’s developers, they finally have design down pat. I’m partial to the Monaco, which unlike some of the other models doesn’t waste space with a hall-like entry “foyer” for you to keep clean. It has a decent-sized kitchen, nice bedrooms, and an easy-to-care-for layout. The “den” (a sort of second breakfast nook) could serve as an office, if I could stir myself to pick up the litter off my desk.

The problem is, even though the property the developers purchased and bladed is vast and so far out from the city they must have bought it for a song, the houses are built right on top of each other. The gorgeous ceiling-to-floor windows that grace the back end of the house look straight into the back porch and windows of the neighbor’s house. You couldn’t walk into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee in the morning without being fully dressed! The side windows on some of these models, which often have small side patios, peer right into the windows or patios of the neighbors’ houses.

Want privacy? Encase your yard in a six-foot block wall! That’s exactly what everybody out there eventually will do. So instead of looking into your neighbor’s windows, your pretty little breakfast nook or den will have a view of an ugly cement wall, three feet outside.

If you could persuade Shea homes to build one of these houses on a larger lot—say, a nice boulder-strewn number with a view of the Bradshaws  up in Yarnell—you would have the house from heaven. The Monaco would be my choice for the dream small house in the middle of 40 acres. But elbow-to-elbow with the guy next door and his kids, cats, and dogs? Don’t think so.

For the privilege of living on top of your neighbor, you’ll pay $218 a month in association fees. That’s for starters: you know the amount will never go down! The fee supports a vast community center with two pools, a spa, a restaurant, and a golf course. Plus the city of Peoria has divested itself of responsibility for the roads: homeowners also have to maintain the streets. In other words, you’re paying a $218 a month tax on top of the county taxes, and every now and again you’ll be assessed to cover the astronomical cost of repairing and repaving the roads.

Makes the slums across the road look pretty good, doesn’t it?

Last night shortly after we crawled into the sack, Cassie and I were rousted by the sound of an explosion. Couldn’t see any flames nearby, so I figured it probably came from the source of the late, great fumes, over to the west of us. Mwa ha ha: another meth house bites the dust!

{sigh} If my son and the choir and most of my friends weren’t located in the middle of the city, the excessively neighborly Vistancia would look pretty good. Realistically, of course, I can’t afford $218+++ in fees to support a golf course (I don’t golf), swimming pools (I dislike swimming in public pools), a restaurant (I can barely afford to eat out now and certainly couldn’t if I had to choke up over two C-bills a month!), a spa, and roads that ought to be maintained by the municipality that’s extracting taxes from me.

LOL! I guess I could afford a forty-year-old trailer in Yarnell, though!

🙂

 

Brand New Dead Things (community center in Yarnell)

 

Bird Rescue

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So, late this afternoon I notice the swimming pool is laboring, choked by all the crud sifting down from the hated palm trees. I’m on the phone leaving word with the accountant’s answering machine about a new little project I’ve cooked up while running across the yard to shut off the pump when I spot yet another bird in the sink of death.

That’s what a pool is, you know: a sink of death. It kills all sorts of small things, from little insects to little children, with birds about a third of the way across the spectrum. In size, I mean.

This one, though, has not yet drowned. It’s managed to climb aboard Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s hose, where it’s perched next to the intake. Because the pump is so thickly clogged, not enough current is sucking to pull the bird off its life raft.

It was a fledgling white-wing, the second to fall into the pool in the past week or ten days. So stunned was the chick that it allowed me to reach in, wrap a paper towel around it, and lift it out of the water.

But…then what?

It couldn’t come in the house: Cassie would make real short work of it. For the same reason, it couldn’t be left on the ground. If Cassie didn’t grab it, the ants would soon eat it alive.

I carried it around to the west side and set it on the shaded concrete bench, figuring it would probably die soon enough on its own.

Half an hour or so later, peered out the Arcadia door to see it was standing on its little feet, still all wadded up and unhappy-looking but distinctly alive. Put some water in a plant dish and set that and a handful of birdseed on the bench. The bird was not interested.

Went out to wrestle with the pool, around phone calls from Gerardo, who claimed to be trying to get a palm tree dude over here this afternoon or Saturday. Took some doing to persuade him that when I said I intend to spend tomorrow in Waddell, I’m not kidding. Pulled Harvey out of the drink; cleaned out his leaf-catcher and the pump pot but decided to let the extremely premature backwash job wait until after the promised palm tree guys have come and gone, since they’ll make an unholy mess of the pool and the pump will have to be backwashed again. Which reminds me: I’ve lost the bonnet to the water-hose-run debris collector.

Damn! Another Home Depot run. Already $126 in the red this month; by the time these guys are done, I’ll be a good $350 in the hole.

But while I’m out there, I realize a couple of adult doves are flying around with uncharacteristic bravado. They must be looking for their pup. So that means the fledgling belongs on the east side of the house, somewhere near its nest. There’s another fledgling hopping around in the tree, which must mean the mating doves haven’t yet lost all their brood to the pool.

After awhile, I spot their nest: about two stories high in a limb of the devil-pod tree. You’d need a cherry-picker to lift this bird back up there. Hm.

Finally, I decide to put the little bird on top of the metal storage shed, which by this time in the afternoon is fully in the shade. But it’s a 110 degrees out there, and the metal is too hot for it to sit on any length of time. A large, flat plant dish, retrieved from the  junk pile hidden behind that side of the house, would work to insulate and hold the bird, though. So I haul out a stepladder and set this thing atop the metal roof.

Go and retrieve the bird, which still shows no inclination to try to escape.

However, when I climb up on the ladder and go to set it in the plant dish, it doesn’t like that idea at all. It panics and tries to fly away, skittering across the corrugated metal roof and falling down behind the shed, between its back side and the concrete wall.

Seriously damn! Dead bird, for sure!

Well, no. I peek back in there and see the bird has landed on its feet and looks OK: a great deal better than it looked when plucked from the pool. The old boards I hid back there years ago are level and coated with an inch or so of composting devil pods and leaves, forming a soft substrate…probably not unlike a nest. It’s shaded and cool back there, and there’s no way Cassie can reach the bird. Probably there are precious few ants back there, too—it’ll take them a while to find the little thing, anyway.

As I write this, it’s coming onto the middle of the night. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight out and peeked behind the shed, expecting to find an avian corpse out there.

Gone!

The bird has flown the coop. Couldn’t see it on the ground, either. So presumably it must have eventually dried out enough to take flight and, with any luck at all, made its way back into the tree and maybe even back to the nest.

Let’s just hope after all that it remembers to stay away from the darned pool!

Images:

Two White-winged Doves perching on a cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
A White-winged Dove perching on a Santa Rita Prickly Pear cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Tardy Roundup: Dishwash detergent edition

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Finally am climbing out from under the mountain of work. Monday the last of the five courses I’ve redesigned and rewritten went up onto their new sites. Yesterday I gave myself a vacation day. Soooo…. More work has already started to accrete: Haven’t written the newsletter that was supposed to have been done last week; haven’t got a single post ahead and so am late with today’s post.

Yea, verily. It’s quarter after 11 and I haven’t done anything even vaguely resembling paying work. Whyyyy? Because I spent half the morning scouring gray film off my glasses and stainless cookware, that’s why.

And why would that be? Because dishwasher detergent no longer works, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the Green Shirts and their lobbyists. As you know, last year the government mandated that detergent manufacturers remove phosphorus, the ingredient that softens water and makes dishwasher detergent function in hard-water areas. In going through my stockpile, I broke into a new container of Finish (phosphorus-free) Powerball tabs, to ill effect. First thing I noticed was that the price hasn’t changed but the package size has: 20 fewer packets. That’s 16% less product for the same or more money. (But don’t worry, folks, be happy: there’s no inflation!) Second thing, of course, is that the stuff doesn’t get the dishes clean. However, it does coat them with a sticky film of whitish-gray gunk that has to be scrubbed off with Barkeeper’s Helper.

To get that $500 appliance sitting under your kitchen counter to do something useful now, you can try one of four things:

• Add a teaspoon of TSP (available at paint stores and some hardware stores—read the label and be sure to get the real thing, not “substitute”) to each washload; or
• Buy commercial dishwasher detergent, which thanks to the wisdom of the restaurant and hotel industries and their lobbyists, was exempted from the new law; or
• Use the dishwasher as a giant dish rack to drain the dishes you now have to wash by hand; or
• Replace the dishwasher with a wine cooler or a new under-counter cabinet.

Me, I’m opting for the commercial dishwasher detergent, which can be found in restaurant and janitorial supply houses or through an online retailer. Yeah, I know: shameful unregenerate environment-wrecking earth-killing megabitch! But…before you hurl that epithet, consider: in these parts sewer water is not returned to rivers and lakes (we don’t even have any rivers or lakes anymore). It’s filtered, which removes most of the phosphorus, and then it’s used to irrigate golf courses, of which we have more, per capita, than any other state in the nation. There, what little remains of the phosphorus is consumed by the grass: it’s a fertilizer.

Well. That project done, that issue resolved, it’s on to more interesting things. To wit: what’s been going on in the blogosphere while I’ve been wandering around the seventh level of Hades?

I got quite a boot out of Crystal’s daily and weekly blogging checklists, over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Oh, to be young and full of energy again! 😉 Seriously, if I would get my act that much together, I’d spend a lot less time spinning my wheels.

Frugal Scholar has published SO many nice posts lately, it’s hard to pick one out. Blogger won’t let me comment on that site anymore—it’s decided I have to sign up first for my own Google Blogger site, for which I have no use and which I ain’t a-gunna do. So about all I can manage is to tell you from here how great some of these stories are. Check out her interesting observation that one may not need to shred documents after all. (But, by way of comment, Frugal: one day my neighbor walked into the alley to dump her trash and found a man sitting on the ground next to our four-house dumpster going through the paper he’d pulled out of there.) Also don’t miss Frugal’s post on frugality and aesthetics, which contains a link to some very inspirational decorating images.

Had to forward Revanche’s post about her new doggle to M’hijito, whose puppy was born just a few days ago. Heh heh heh heh…  As Gai Shan Life fans know, Revanche and her PiC have been contemplating their coming wedding, which has led her to some fairly amazing ruminations. How many of us can lean back and murmur, smugly, Thank God we’ll never have to go through that again?

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan has found a site that will disgorge a free credit score for you. As you’ll recall, I recently ordered up credit reports from Annual Credit Report.com, but credit bureaus do not normally share your actual credit score without charging a fee. There’s a sales pitch at the site Evan discovered, but as he explains, it’s easy to avoid if you know about it.

Money Beagle, who apparently is still biding his time until Mrs. Beagle delivers the latest Beaglet, tells a very funny story on himself (uhm…funny if you enjoy watching other people’s Laurel & Hardy antics).

OMG! Hang onto your hats, folks, and check out the entire freaking wardrobe Mrs. Accountability scored for under twenty bucks! Not only did she practically steal the stuff, the clothes are cute and will look great on her.

Nicole and Maggie… Theirs is one of my fave blogs, which I’ve finally, just this minute, gotten around to adding to Funny’s blogroll. This post from Grumpy Rumblings felt particularly apposite this week, after I’d spent a fair amount of time listening to both KJG and La Maya hold forth about the peculiarities of their extended families.

Over at The Digerati Life, Silicon Valley Blogger has been posting a lot of nice pragmatic stuff. But in amongst the good advice, what should pop up but one of those ruminations that I tend to favor, a piece by writer Jacques Sprenger on money and couples relationships.

Y’know, I doubt if any living, breathing blogger can crank more posts in a single day than Julia at Bargain Babe. Every day, it’s deals deals deals—you really need to subscribe so you can keep your eye on this site. Today there’s a cookbook giveaway, and then leads to fistfuls of grocery coupons and free seeds and paw cleaner…paw cleaner? Go there, get that.

Check out this fast but interesting post on the psychology of brokitude, over at Money Crush. As much is not said here as is said…and that’s what makes it intriguing.

Microfibers, microfibers, OMG microfibers! At Ultimate Money Blog, Mrs. Money does a dance to spring microfiber cloths and asks readers for creative ideas on using the things.

So it goes. And now I must excuse myself to write a very, very, very overdue newsletter.