Coffee heat rising

How to Talk to Your Hair Stylist

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Bear with me, gents, while us chicklets indulge in some Girl Talk.

wook! See update, below!!!

Over at Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability discovered a cool gadget to allow a woman with long hair to create a DIY bob at home. She tried it, and it turned out looking pretty darned nice.

This led to a rumination on the cost of hair maintenance, something I’ve held forth about, too. For years I wore my hair at shoulder length, partly because SDXB liked long hair, partly because I enjoy the sensuality of long hair, too, and partly because it saves huge wads of money when you don’t have to traipse into a salon once every four to six weeks. But eventually I got it cut short. It looked a lot better, and the effect on strangers, who had been given to taking one look at me and dismissing me as poor white trash, was marked.

When I got laid off, I could no longer afford Shane the Wonder-Stylist, and so he and I parted ways. For a while I was going to a woman in Tempe who did a good job, but that’s a long drive, and besides, just the site of the GDU campus gives me a flinch reflex. Once my work there ended, I started looking for people in town. Have been through four of them; one was very good, and the rest…well…

Last time I went in to the newest stylist, she cut my hair so short you could see my scalp through what remained! Since my hair is very thick, that’s telling. She cut off all the natural curl, so I could no longer scrunch it into a cute style and I had to stand in front of the mirror dorking with a hair dryer to get myself presentable enough to be seen in public. I hate that.

Since then I’ve been trying to let it grow out, figuring when there’s finally something to work with again, I’ll go back to the Tempe stylist. It’s been weeks and my hair is still too short to work with. And it just looks terrible.

The problem is, it’s very hard to describe to a stylist what you want, especially if you want something nonstandard like not having bangs flopping down on your face. “Please cut it short, go with the natural flow of the curls and waves, and don’t leave bangs falling in my eyes” doesn’t seem to register.

However, recently I found this handy site, which reveals the specific stylist-speak names of haircuts and coloring patterns. It’s kind  of cool, because…mirabilis! It gives you a way to talk to your hair stylist! The drawings give you a clue to what each style should look like, and the names attached to them apparently are standard names for specific styles.

The site not only gives you the names of popular styles, it suggests what to say to the stylist to communicate what you have in mind: “Keep layers long in back and choppy all around. This cut is all about movement. Add heavy, uneven bangs. They can be tucked behind ears or left in front of face.”

If you google the style names given here, most searches will bring up photos showing what the cut looks like on a real (or nearly real) human being. Google “short bob” hairstyle (with short bob in quote marks), and up come a number of sites with images, some of which suggest my trashed hairstyle may be no worse than anyone else’s…

At any rate, it gives you a starting point for talking to your stylist: at least you can know what the style you think you want is called!

Update:

Mrs. Accountability reports that she did not use the bob-making device to get the cool hairstyle shown on her site. In fact, that style was created by a living, breathing, paid stylist.

Je m’excuse!

Where Education Goes, There Goes America

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Down the tubes, that’s where it’s going. Education, I mean. Especially higher education. And by extension, all that we know as America the Beautiful is in the toilet, too.

Mercifully I don’t have to teach in the lower grades, where administrators and taxpayers feel teachers should work for poor pay in worse working conditions and are reviled for daring to organize. Instead, along with legions of my colleagues, I get to teach the products of those conditions.

Here’s what’s on the wind at the Great Desert University: At a recent college meeting, faculty were informed that the university plans to eliminate as many faculty associates as possible.

“Faculty associates” are grossly underpaid part-timers, desperate enough to take contract work with no benefits and, given the de facto workload, at less than minimum wages. When I was teaching at GDU in a full-time adjunct position with a modest salary and benefits, I taught eight sections a year. For what my salary and benefits cost the university, GDU could have hired FAs to teach eighteen sections, and still had $945 left over. Most adjuncts teach the required lower-division scutwork courses, especially freshman composition, a hugely work-intensive writing course.

So, a large portion of the FAs are to go, but some will remain. Those who do remain will be required to teach a hundred and fifty students. That’s 75 students per writing course, since GDU limits part-timers to two sections per semester. A full-time adjunct, who teaches four-and-four, would be teaching three hundred students each semester in writing-intensive L-1 courses.

By way of pretending to accomplish this impossible task, the university will recruit undergraduate students to work as “peer reviewers.” These kids, whose job will be to “review” but not to grade papers, will be trained by the director of composition. In other words, they will not be true teaching assistants, but just one more responsibility for the adjunct to have to deal with.

One full-time adjunct on the West campus has already announced she’s walking, unemployment being a far more attractive option than slave labor of this magnitude. She told friends the work was crushing her…and that was before this announcement came down.

Such a short-sighted and merciless scheme came about because the state’s extreme right-wing legislature, while it’s busily engaged in passing laws that engender one costly lawsuit after another, in suing the federal government over health-care reform, and in fulminating that President Obama should prove (to their satisfaction) that he was born in the U.S., is killing the beast by cutting education funds to virtually nil. State funding for the community colleges was cut 85 percent this year, and you can be sure they’ll do something similar next year.

Students come into my classes from the public high schools better prepared (maybe) than they were a dozen years ago, but only by dint of ridiculous standardized tests that put them into ticky-tacky boxes so they all come out looking just the same. They can recite a few facts and they can organize a standardized three-paragraph or five-paragraph essay. But they still can’t formulate a logical sequence of thoughts on their own, they still can’t discern a reliable fact from raw baloney, and they have become artists at gaming the system.

This semester I decided that instead of knocking myself out riding herd on two or three dozen learning exercises and quizzes, I would take a leaf out of the University of Phoenix’s book: don’t grade the things. The UofP, according to a friend who teaches there, inflicts the same kinds of quizzoids and exercises on its lower-division comp/communication students that I do, with the same purpose: to focus attention on the high points of reading and lecture material. But instead of motivating students to do these exercises by paying them in the currency of the classroom (grades), the UofP tells them that the exercises are there for the students’ benefit. If you want a decent grade in the course, students are advised, you’ll do the exercises. If you don’t do them, you run the risk of getting lower scores on the assignments that are graded. And then: the only graded assignments are the actual, required writings.

For the English 102 sections, this cuts my workload from 23 graded assignments to nine. I’m still scoring drafts and peer reviews, since we’re required to teach writing as a “recursive process.” Drafting and peer reviewing is part and parcel of this theory of composition pedagogy. If that were not the case, making the students responsible for their own learning process would cut my workload to three graded assignments.

Okay, so this semester we’re seeing exactly how the new strategy works. Over the weekend I reviewed their responses to an exercise asking them to apply some new knowledge (i.e., stuff they should’ve learned in the fourth grade but didn’t) to some specific examples.

The exercise went online in one of Blackboard’s pseudo-blogs, which allow students to post material in a format that appears on the instructor’s end as long toilet-paper pages containing everyone’s work. The program eliminates the endlessly time-consuming task of downloading, opening, and re-uploading file after file after file. They can see each other’s work in the “blogs”; BB just changed providers for this program, and I can’t find any way to block students from viewing other students’ posts (as the previous program would do). I’m told it would do this, but apparently it won’t do it retroactively in “blogs” that were created before the program was {snark!} “updated.”

Of 50 students, 27 posted responses. And get this: a bunch of them cheated!

No joke. They copied each others’ work and posted it, for an assignment that bore NO CREDIT.

How do I know?

They copied and pasted the same typos. As in “the car cab goes from zero to 60….” They meant can, not cab. Or at least, the person who first wrote it meant that.

And how did they do on the fourth-grade work with which they were presented? Well, they had 20 questions. One of these snared 17 wrong answers from students (out of 27 respondents!). One had 13 wrong answers, and two had 12. These figures aren’t surprising, considering that they’re copying and pasting each others’ errors. What is surprising is that as they’re copying and pasting, they don’t spot typos and obvious bêtises. The only thing you can conclude is that a significant number of them aren’t even looking at what they’re pasting.

Cheating at solitaire…

Well, my friends. Those of you who work in HR, who run businesses, or who expect to do so in the future will soon have these fine young job applicants at your doorstep.

And that is why the future of America looks dimmer and dimmer.

Did you know that only 37 percent of white Americans have bachelor’s degrees? Those who do are getting them on the strength of this kind of work. By short-changing our schools, colleges, and universities, we’re short-changing ourselves and short-changing our country.

We are, in a word, screwed.

Excel vs. Quicken

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So…how’s the bookkeeping working, after a year of using Excel instead of Quicken for Mac?

Last January I switched to Excel for tracking my bank accounts, budget, and credit card charges. After years as a Quicken customer, I’d really lost patience: data vanished in the transfer from Windows to Mac, Quicken for Mac was clunky, and I’d long ago had it with having to upgrade to a pricey  new version every time I turned around. It appears I’m not alone in those sentiments.

Excel has its advantages and its disadvantages vis à vis Quicken. Biggest negative: it can’t talk to your bank or your investment house. Quicken lets you upload and download transactions and data from those august institutions. Nor does Excel care to converse with TurboTax, Intuit’s tax preparation software. Excel talks to you and only to you (or so we hope).

If you want to integrate your bookkeeping with your banking and investing, however, there are alternatives, some of them out there in the Cloud. Programs such as Mint.com (which, alas, was purchased by Intuit), Buxfer, MoneyStrands, Pear Budget, or Thrive sometimes do that sort of thing, and of course Mint will now interact with TurboTax. Not having tried one of these programs, I hesitate to state that any are better, worse, or the same as Quicken. But there they are: something to try if your patience with Intuit wears thin.

Excel has one helluva learning curve, especially for those of us with English-major math skills. After a year of working with it, I’d say my skills are no better than they were at the outset. A year of manipulating Quicken left me with a black belt in Advanced Quickening. However, a rudimentary understanding of Excel’s functions allowed me to build checking and savings accounts and to massage the data into something that I think will be intelligible for my tax accountant.

It’s useful to know that Microsoft now offers a variety of home and office financial  management templates, designed to work with Excel. But it’s pretty easy to build your own.

To build the new Excel workbook, I tried to ape the accounts and functions of Quicken. This entailed creating spreadsheets for each bank account, laid out in identical patterns, plus another spreadsheet for credit-card charges. The latter allowed me to reset the balance each month to the amount budgeted for discretionary spending (which is all that goes on my credit cards), so that the bottom line showed how much was left in any given month’s allowance.

Typical headers for bank account
Tracking credit-card spending against an $800 budget

Come the first of this year, I created what I hope is an intelligible spreadsheet for the accountant by merging data from the credit-card spreadsheet with the bank-account spreadsheet entries and then sorting all the data by category. This made it possible to summarize tax-related data while also making all the year’s transactions, organized by budget category, easily visible and transparent to her.

A number of revelations ensued as I tried to organize this material for the tax accountant. One is that it makes sense to number tax-related categories (1, 2, 3…), so a “sort” command will bring them up at the top of the “sorted” spreadsheet. For example,

1 Medical
2 Mortgage interest
3 Trade group dues

…And the like. When “sorting” data, Excel wants to put numbered items before alphabetical items; so, if you preface each tax-related category with a numeral, the “sort” function will gather all the tax-relevant categories together.

Yeah, I know there’s something called a “pivot report,” and yes, I do suspect it could solve all my problems. However, only a Druid could comprehend the instructions in Excel’s Help file. I gave up after several efforts at trying to call upon those spirits.

In addition to its impenetrability, Excel has the annoying quirk that the (very simple!) formula you enter to create a running balance sometimes comes unstuck for no discernible reason, giving you an incorrect balance. Occasionally I haven’t discovered this until I’ve tried to reconcile my books with the bank’s. Figuring out the problem can be really difficult, because it often results not from incorrect data entry but from some mysterious disjunct between what you’ve asked the program to do and what it decides, midway through the process, to suddenly start doing. When gut instinct tells you something like this is happening, the solution is to go up to a row where the formula is visibly working and then drag the “balance” cell’s qualities all the way down the column. This corrects the error, wherever the heck it started.

We know the irritants presented by Quicken. It’s bloatware. It’s vaporware. The Mac version is clunkware whose files can neither be read by the PC version nor converted to a readable version. Your accountant, you can be sure, uses the PC version. And worst of all, its maker Intuit forces you to buy new, ever-more-bloated versions every time you take a deep breath. IMHO, these are very, very large irritants.

So, of course, is the difficulty of learning and manipulating Excel.

For me, just now it’s a toss-up. For a brief, not-so-shining moment last month, I considered running out and buying the latest version of Quicken to restart my books in 2011. But, on reflection, possibly not. Quicken’s biggest advantage over Excel is its ability to commune with your financial institutions. I’ve never felt moved to use that feature; my financial manager does the buying and selling of shares, and it’s pretty easy to access the credit union, the IRA, and the brokerage accounts online. Comparing and reconciling them is very simple, and I don’t need a piece of intermediary software to perform the desired transactions.

So. To the extent that one can be said to ♥ any software, I suppose I ♥ Excel.

What program do you prefer for bookkeeping, and why?

Stir-fry That Broccoli

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Okay, okay, broccoli-lovers take exception to my having cast asparagus at their favorite veggie. Several people remarked that the idea of stir-frying the stuff (my strategy for making it palatable) sounds pretty good. IMHO, it’s even better when converted into soup, a plan for which follows.

Here’s the thing: you can stir-fry a pile of bargain or garden-fresh veggies, let them cool, and then bag them in meal-sized Ziplock bags to use as the basis of future stir-fry meals, with or without  meat. Or you can just stir-fry enough for a single meal, either as a fully vegetarian dinner or as a side dish.

Here’s how to make broccoli more or less edible to go with a larger meal:

Get your hands on…

• a head of fresh, crisp broccoli
• an onion
• one or two large cloves (or three or four small cloves) garlic
• a lemon
• vegetable oil (olive oil is nice)
• optionally, a bottle of soy or Worcestershire sauce

Cut off the broccoli florets. Reserve the stems to make broccoli soup (below). Be sure the florets are fairly small; if necessary, cut the larger chunks in half.

Coarsely chop the onion. Mince the garlic. Slice the lemon in half.

I like to precook the onion a little because sautéeing it until it’s soft and even beginning to brown brings out its sweetness. But it’s not necessary. If you choose to do this, skim the bottom of the pan with some oil, toss the chopped onion around in it to coat, and let it cook gently, over medium-low heat, until the onion is translucent and sweet. Then turn up the heat to medium high, add the broccoli florets and garlic, and stir the veggies around until the broccoli is heated through and turns an even brighter green than it already is. If you decide not to precook the onion, just toss the whole mess into the oil in the pan and cook together over medium heat (this will give you crisper onion pieces with a sharper onion flavor).

As the veggies are verging on being done, squeeze half a lemon over them. If you like your veggies salty and Asian-flavored, add some soy sauce. Worcestershire sauce is a good substitute if you have no soy sauce in the pantry.

Serve quickly, piping hot.

To prepare a mountain of veggies for future stir-fries:

• a collection of fresh veggies, whatever strikes your fancy
• garnish-like additions such as bean sprouts and canned water chestnuts
• grated ginger
• an onion or two
• plenty of garlic
• vegetable oil
• optional: sesame oil

Clean the vegetables and cut them into one- or two-inch pieces. Gather them into mounds according to the amount of time they’ll take to cook. Onion, broccoli, carrots, and celery like take the longest, so they will go into the pan first. Bell peppers, summer squash, asparagus, Napa cabbage, and mushrooms take less time to cook; put them into the after the first round of veggies have been there for a few minutes. Finally, garlic, ginger, and leafy vegetables such as spinach, chard, or baby bok choy go in last.

So, skim the bottom of the pan with your vegetable oil. If you have sesame oil, add a few drops—a little goes a long way. Preheat the pan long enough to get the oil hot but not smoking.

Then start adding veggies in order, from the longest-cooking to the fastest cooking. The last things to add should be your leafy veggies; stir-fry these just until they’re wilted.

Since you’re going to store these in the freezer for future use, hold the soy sauce and tofu. These can be added when you bring out the veggies to complete the final meal.

To do this, you’ll need…

• the frozen veggies (defrost if they’ve clumped together; if not, you probably can toss them into the pan frozen)
• skinless chicken breast, reasonably tender beef or pork, shrimp, or scallops
• tofu
• minced or grated ginger
• soy sauce (or Worcestershire, in a pinch)
• hoisin sauce, if desired
• lemon juice, if desired
• little green onions, if desired
• bean sprouts, if desired
• cooked rice

Slice chicken, beef, or pork into thin pieces (about 1/4-inch thick).  Shrimp should be peeled; otherwise shrimp or scallops can be used whole. Dry the tofu on a paper towel or clean kitchen towel and cut into 1/2- to 1-inch pices.

Cook a pot of rice. When the rice is done, proceed with the stir-fry:

Again, skim a pan with vegetable oil; if desired, add a few drops of sesame oil. Preheat over medium-high heat. Working quickly, place the meat or shellfish into the hot oil. Stir as it cooks. Add the tofu. Add some soy sauce. Squeeze some lemon juice over the top. Add the frozen vegetables, stirring and tossing in the pan. While they cook, add the ginger. Add more soy sauce and lemon juice to keep the pan from going dry. As soon as the veggies are hot, add sprouts, and scallions, as desired.

And voilà! Dinner is served! Mound some rice in the middle of a plate and top with a serving of stir-fried meat and veggies.

What about all those woody stems from the broccoli?

These are the makings of a killer broccoli soup. You’ll need this stuff:

• broccoli stems
• another onion
• maybe a little garlic, if you please
• chicken broth or water
• maybe a little sherry, if you like
• milk or cream
• butter, if desired
• olive oil or vegetable oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• a blender or immersion blender

Cut the stems into manageable chunks. Coarsely chop the onion and the optional garlic. In a stock pot or large, deep frying pan, sauté the onion in oil, very slowly, until it’s well cooked and soft, even beginning to caramelize. Add the cut-up broccoli stems. Stir these around in the oil until they’re beginning to cook. Add garlic if desired.

Then add enough chicken broth, water, or both to cover the vegetables. Turn up the heat to DayGlo blast and stand there (do not leave the stove!) until the soup just starts to come to a boil. As bubbles start to roil, immediately turn the heat down. If you’re using an electric stove, you’ll need two burners for this trick: bring the soup to a boil on one burner. Meanwhile, have another burner turned on to “low.” Move the pan to the burner with the lower heat as soon as the stock comes to a boil. Adjust the heat to keep the broth at a steady, slow simmer.

Now let the veggies cook until the broccoli stems are soft all the way through when poked with a knife or fork. When they reach this state, turn off the heat and allow the food to cool a bit.

Run everything through your blender, a cup or two at a time, and collect the purée in a big bowl or large pan, or use your immersion blender to purée the soup in the cooking pan.

Finish the soup by adding milk or cream to taste, and, if desired, melt some butter into it. A dash of sherry gives the soup some panâche. Season with salt and pepper. It’s very nice when served with a dollop of yogurt over the top.

Image: Broccoli and Cross-sections. By Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au. GNU Free Documentation License.

Solitude Is Precious

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Isn’t it interesting, the number of widowed and divorced women who choose to stay single? One recent study showed that among Europeans, a man lives longer if he’s married and a women lives longer if she’s single. Whatever the reasons, a lot of women seem to intuit this and, about midway through life, begin to prefer a state of onliness. There’s something to be said for solitude.

Over at Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman holds forth eloquently on the pleasures and challenges of aloneness, spinning off a post from a site called The Quest for $85,000. If you haven’t run across the Quest blogger yet, you should definitely pay a visit—though it’s yet another of those sites where the person documents a struggle to get out of debt, there’s some very engaging writing here.

In a similar vein, NicoleandMaggie generated a lot of commentary with a lively post suggesting some people are not cut out to be stay-at-home parents.

On other fronts, take a look at the pretty bowls Bargain Babe scored at Anthropologie for dollar-store prices! She shares her secrets for how to snare amazing deals from that glitzy store.

Money Crush has a thoughtful post on pursuing what you love for a living.

Mrs. Accountability asks readers to weigh in on the benefits of cash-back vs. buying things with rewards points.

After a decluttering frenzy, Mrs. Money pauses to consider seven so-called “superfoods” you can afford—and they’re all delicious (ohhh, welllll…maybe with the exception of broccoli, the only subject George Bush and I ever agreed upon).

Over Forty and Loving It emits a cri de coeur over the Republicans’ determination to do us all out of any  kind of sane healthcare system.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan describes his accounting scheme to describe his progress on net worth without having to reveal information he prefers to keep private, and then emits his own cri de coeur about people who bellyache about money while they diddle away enough to beggar King Midas.

At Brip-Blap, Steve considers ways to handle fear, and in doing so describes an amazing and hair-raising situation he had to cope with while living overseas.

Five-Cent Nickel and his readers share their worries about keeping sensitive data secure.

OMG! Did you know you can now buy divorce insurance? Jim at Bargaineering asks for readers’ take on this product…when you look at the terms he describes, it looks like yet another scam. The most coverage you can buy is 25 grand. My husband spent that much per year during the time he was paying me alimony. The insurance is pricey and it doesn’t cover enough to matter.

Welp, speaking of aloneness, there’s nobody here but me to fix breakfast and feed the dog, so I’d better get up and start moving. Have a great weekend!

The High Cost of AARP Delta Dental

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Well, I expected the AARP Delta Dental plan I enrolled in last December to cover little more than the occasional cleaning, which, when paid for out of pocket, is $93 at my dentist’s office. But what I didn’t expect was to have the plan effectively land me in a hole that would take two years to climb out of.

Here’s how this comes to be:

You pay $450 a year for dental coverage. Each year, this is supposed to give you three “free” cleanings—each of which costs you a $20 copay. After a full year’s waiting period, you’re eligible for a discount of about 50% on crowns and other expensive procedures. However, in addition to the waiting period and the copays, there’s a $100 deductible that has to be met before even a routine cleaning is covered.

I need a new crown to replace an ancient one that’s been broken for years. Delta will not cover a crown until you’ve been in  the plan for a full year.

So, to arrive at the point where you can replace a broken crown, you have to spend $450 for the first year’s premiums, then re-up for another year, to the tune of another $450, and pay $200 in deductibles. Then, the most that will be covered for the crown will be half the price. Think about that.

My dentist charges $1,150 for a new gold crown. His charge for a routine cleaning, which one would normally do twice (not three times) a year, is $93. Over the course of two years, then, a patient with decent dental health but who needs an old crown replaced would pay $1,522 for cleaning and a new crown. What would this cost if you purchased AARP’s Delta Dental coverage, compared to what it would cost if you were uninsured?

Interesting. You pay $233 more for the same services and products, and for the privilege of having to wait a full year to get your crown fixed. The cost to get the crown plus routine medical care, if you just decided to pay for it, actually would be $186 less (i.e., $1,336), because you wouldn’t have to wait a year to be eligible for the Delta’s 50% discount.

Clearly, you’d be ahead to simply put aside $450 a year in a fund dedicated to paying dental bills. Assuming, that is, that you have decent dental health—no gingivitis, cavities, or teeth about to fall out of your head. If even a single year passed without a major dental event, the amount that would accrue in savings ($714) over the two years you have to subscribe to be eligible for coverage on a crown would cover two-thirds of the crown’s cost—not the measly 50 percent (if you’re lucky) that Delta covers. At the start of year 2 (assuming you fund your savings with a lump sum), you would have $714. If the second year passed with no dental crises, then at the start of year 3 your dental savings fund would have a beginning balance of $978.

Hmmm….  Makes the $50 tab for that Braun electric toothbrush that really keeps your teeth clean look like quite a bargain, doesn’t it? It pays to take care of your teeth!

I just canceled the Delta Dental plan. Since I signed up for it in December, even though I’ve never used it, they’re gouging me for premiums through March.

If you’re retired, think twice about Delta Dental! And remember, just because a product has the AARP brand associated with it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best choice for you.