Coffee heat rising

A PF Blogger’s Glass Ceiling?

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A group of women bloggers I recently fell in with subscribes to the idea that a blogger’s glass ceiling holds women writers back from the big time in the PF blogging world. How big the  PF “big time” is remains to be seen. We know several male bloggers—Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar and J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly, among others—have built sites that earn enough to free them from their day jobs to write full-time.

On the other hand, we know successful women PF bloggers are holding forth, too: Silicon Valley Blogger’s The Digerati Life is going well enough to excuse her from the day job treadmill.

I don’t know whether Squawkfox earns proprietor Kerry Taylor enough to quit the ratrace, but this very day she posted an announcement that the Globe and Mail has her in the running for its Best of Money Blogs poll. Quite a few of the sites on my blogroll are written by women—most of them, come to think of it—but I’m pretty sure none of us is making a living at this business. MSN Smart Spending supports a couple of long-time women journalists, but they’re freelance contractors with no health insurance and, one might fairly guess, frugal wages. On the other hand, plenty of male bloggers aren’t making a nickel and a dime to rub together, either.

Is there some sort of good ole boys’ club out there for bloggers, a virtual country club where men go to play computer golf games together, every day but Ladies’ Day? It’s one of several issues that have been floating around in my coffee cup as I mull over ways to improve on Funny about Money and build its readership. Having reflected on this for a while, I really don’t think so.

Clive Thompson published a fairly nuanced article in a 2006 issue of New York Magazine, reflecting on the permutations of blogger success. He reports on research showing that one key indicator of a blog’s success is the number of links pointing to it, particularly links on large sites. The “A-list,” as he calls the most successful of the monetized blogs, is extremely small; “most bloggers toil in total obscurity.” This isn’t surprising, and by extension it’s unsurprising that lots of women bloggers are among the totally obscure, along with lots of men bloggers.

If you look at the blogs that men write—the ones that seem to be successfully monetized—and the blogs that women write, you see some fundamental differences. Successful blogs tend to be tightly focused; that is not often true of women’s blogs, which characteristically are rather gestalt. I believe that difference stems from men’s and women’s responses to fundamentally different life experiences. Women’s daily lives are gestalt, scattered among a score of conflicting responsibilities, whereas men’s daily lives are often spent on a job where they focus for long periods on the work at hand.

Consider, for example, Peter Rojas, who in 2006 was supposedly “the best-compensated blogger in history.” When Thompson visited him, we learn,

he’s sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he’s just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. “Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow,” he says, sipping a glass of water. “But to keep it there? It’s fucking hard work, man. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started.”

How many of us, whether we’re women or not, have 11 hours a day to spend on a single task? Writing at Work It, Mom, Lylah Alphonse, proprietor of Write. Edit. Repeat, puts it in a nutshell:

It’s about the daily juggle—my career, my commute, freelance work, homework, housework, married life, social life, and parenting—and finding the time to get it all done.

The issue for women is that few of us have 11 uninterrupted hours, or even eight, or even six, in which to develop, write, and market a blog. Observing my own work habits, I can say they reflect a lifetime of adaptation to demands on my time that come from every direction: work, friends, parenthood, wifehood, school, housekeeping, yard care, pool care, shopping, money management, pet care, healthcare, bureaucrats, editors, clients, advertisers, neighbors, cops…you name it, and somebody thinks they have a claim on my time that’s more important than anything I imagine I should be doing with my time.

The natural response to a cacophony of demands like this is to learn to do several things at once. And that is a very inefficient way of working. Yesterday, for example, around trying trying to get my blogging act together I had to…

• Walk with a friend at dawn, dragging the dog along by way of getting two things done at once;
• Call WellPoint to find out where the bill for Medicare Part D is, necessitating another time-wasting turn through a punch-a-button phone maze;
• Check and adjust pool chemicals;
• Wash two weeks’ worth of laundry;
• Read 80 pages of technical copy for a client;
• Rough out a calendar for one of my fall courses;
• Dredge up some old university-level course materials, rewrite and reformat 21 single-spaced pages newly targeted for lower-division community college students, and key them to the proposed new course syllabus;
• Create another single-spaced page of boilerplate copy-&-pastable comments keyed to this material;
• Feed the dog;
• Feed myself;
• Read page proofs;
• Water the plants…

I was in front of my computer more on than off from about 5:30 in the morning to about 11:00 at night. But as you can see, that time was interrupted repeatedly, and relatively little of it was spent focusing on what I thought of as the day’s primary task: learning more about driving traffic to FaM and putting some of those strategies into gear.

You know…if you have a wife who’s doing those household tasks and doing battle with the outside world, you have a lot more space in which to focus on your enterprise. And an enterprise—a business enterprise—is what a blog ultimately is. My guess is that men are socialized in many ways to focus more directly on the job at hand and are better at resisting interruption.

As I write this, I’m also dinking with trying to figure out how to get Alexa‘s code into FaM’s header. And really I do need to get up and drive to the oculist’s shop and find out why those glasses that were supposed to have been done last Wednesday haven’t surfaced. And brush my teeth and take a shower and wash my hair and fertilize the citrus trees and…oh, yeah: I forgot to eat, too.

Compare a few women’s PF sites with a few men’s, and by and large you see the difference I mentioned above. Check out the topics of the last few blogs at these Male-run and Female-run sites:

The Simple Dollar (M)
• Walking from your mortgage
• Employees’ attitudes
• Financial advice to readers
• Book review
• Frugal tips

Budgeting in the Fun Stuff (F)
• Monthly household budget
• Splurge on bedroom furniture
• Yakezie Alexa ranking
• Weekly favorites link-love roundup
• Gardening

Bargaineering (M)
• Federal legislation re extending tax cuts and unemployment compensation
• Increase on FDIC insurance to become permanent
• Moving a CD ladder to another bank
• Ally Bank’s .25% CD renewal bonus
• “Legal ripoffs”

Out of Debt Again (F)
• Top referrers
• Paperless bank withdrawals?
• Plan to pay off Discovery card
• Gardening
• Review of 2010 Quicken Deluxe

Darwin’s Finance (M)
• Analysis of energy tax credit toward central AC
• Gold bubble?
• Debt & major financial crises
• Saving for college
• Greek debt crisis & the markets

A Gai Shan Life (F)
• Summer travel costs
• Took out a store credit card
• Relaxing; blog challenge
• Weddings & cost of travel
• Freelancing as lifestyle

Five-Cent Nickel (M)
• Mortgage strategies
• America’s worst banks
• Credit card offers
• Traditional vs. Roth IRAs
• Sallie Mae raises online savings rate

Frugal Scholar (F)
• Children’s books
• Pantry remodel leads to domestic squabble, food ruminations
• Cookbook collection
• Pantry project (with literary references)
• Gardening & frugality

Get Rich Slowly (M)
• Home safety precautions
• Personal data collection
• The $20 challenge
• Learning from Baby Boomer experience
• Finishing what you started
(These are all guest posts, since JD has been on vacation)

The Digerati Life (F)
• Nintendo Wii games to cut down her gym costs
• Credit card review
• Carnival of Financial Planning
• How to lower homowner’s insurance costs
• Rant at annoying “Wall Street trader letter” circulating on Web

Notice how tightly focused the men’s most recent posts are? While the women are not exactly off-topic, they tend to write more personally and they often wander from the topic of personal finance in its strictest sense. Counting a discussion of a financial matter framed in terms of the current events in one’s own life as “personal” posts, I come up with this quantitative comparison of subject matter:

Men
• Personal Finance, Economy: 21
• Personal commentary: 2
• Blogging: 0
• Other: 2

Women
• Personal finance, Economy: 5
• Personal commentary: 13
• Blogging: 5
• Other: 2

Sooo… Does this have meaning? Should all us girls who just wanna have fun making a living off blogging start copying the boys?

Not IMHO. But I do think we need to recognize that women have a different blogging style from men’s. Possibly we have different things to say to the world.  Moi, I like reading personal takes on personal finance (isn’t that why we call it “personal,” after all?)—but I have to recognize that may restrict my readership to other women.

The other lesson I take from this observation is some of the men’s blogs show how much focused energy is devoted to those sites. Making one of these things fly pretty clearly requires stretches of uninterrupted concentration. You don’t get the sense of gestalt from, say, The Simple Dollar, where Trent is posting at least two articles a day, often lengthy ones, that you do where authors appear to be writing on the fly, while they’re braiding the threads of their lives and can’t let go of even one.

Choir Is Over…

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Today was the choir’s last performance before its summer hiatus. {sigh}

Everyone else, I expect, is happy for a break—especially the paid staff, who take the term “hard-working” to a whole new level of meaning. But I’ll miss it. When you don’t have much of a life, you tend to get invested in an activity that brings you together with a bunch of nice people.

I really will miss the superb voices of the professionals and near-professionals who form the chamber choir. They sing each Sunday during communion. It was this incredible music that drew me to the church: attending a service there is like going to a chamber music concert. Every week. All through the fall, winter, and spring.

We had a great party this afternoon, wherein the James Beard potatoes au gratin knockoff was a humble entry among some truly awesome dishes. One couple occasionally brings salmon smoked in their own cooker—it is invariably splendid. Everything was good; one broccoli salad was just delicious, and I don’t even like broccoli! And some of those people are dessert artists.

Many of them leave town for the summer, since they own vacation homes or they live somewhere else and spend the winters here. Almost all are gone for at least a week or two. But I expect some of them will show up at the regular Sunday services. I suppose if I would get myself in gear on Sundays, I could reconnect with them there over the summer.

I’m not very churchly myself. But the director said we could sit in the choir loft, if we chose, during the summer services. That would work: first because I enjoy watching the organist as she plays, and second because it’s amazing to be close to the various musicians who come in to perform. And third, because it makes it easy for me to evade going down to the communion rail. I’m superstitiously averse to drinking out of a communal chalice, and I do not believe for a moment that dipping the host in the wine is one whit more sanitary than sipping shared wine.

Really, I don’t fare well with colds or the flu—almost died from one case of influenza, and recovery takes about twice as long as it does for most people—and so I don’t do things that put me at risk. As adjunct faculty, I get no sick leave; the college docks your pay if you don’t show up, and I can’t afford to lose even one day’s shekels, much less a whole week’s worth. And when you live alone, getting sick can be difficult, because there’s no one to help you or to get you something to eat when you can’t drag yourself into the kitchen.

So that’s my excuse. 😉

Welp, it’s gunna be a long, hot summer, financially very scary. I have no idea when or how the college will pay for the online course prep and so can’t rely on that income to cover bills. While the Copyeditor’s Desk holds some funds that could cover a shortfall, I want to keep that money in the bank in case I need it this fall. There’s no guarantee that either of the eight-week courses slated for fall semester will make. If either fails to make, it’ll be a nuisance; if they’re both canceled, I’ll need every penny the S-corporation can disgorge to make ends meet. At the moment, though, it does contain enough to carry me through the fall semester, and then some. I just don’t want to diddle it away over the summer.

The aftermath of the mad shopping spree, the dental bill, and the glasses comes due with this month’s AMEX bill, speaking of diddling money away. However, it appears that diddle-it-away savings will cover those extravaganzas. So I’m pretty certain the overage collected during the cool winter months, when I didn’t have to run either the heat or the water, will carry me through the summer.

I may need some divine intervention, though. It could be worth visiting the church now and again.

Shrine-of-Guadalupe

Image: pgnielsen79, Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Wikipedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Ultimate Church Potluck Dish

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Sooo…. The instant the sign-up sheet for the end-of-year choir party surfaced, I shot over like a rocket to get my name in first, so as not to be cut off at the pass in my quest to volunteer to bring my favorite amazingly cheap but amazingly delicious dish, potatoes au gratin.

Never sign up for anything when you’re distracted by ambition. My beady little eyes were so blinded by the glory of getting there first that I neglected to consider the venue. This shindig is not taking place at the church, which has a kitchen (two of them, actually) with enough refrigerator space to accommodate the 11th armored division’s mobile mess hall. It’s happening at the choir director’s house.

{sigh} What was I to do with a bubbling, 350-degree panful of potatoes, sauce, and cheese for the two hours in which we are to rehearse and perform before the party starts?

Couldn’t easily take it with me. It would have to be cooked in the church kitchen, which would mean it would be overcooked, since the period between the time we process up the aisle and the time the last note soars out of the organ is over an hour. Also, it would be wildly hot: getting a pan of searing hot potatoes from the stove to my car through a mob of people and from my car to the choir director’s house would be a challenge…to say nothing of figuring out how to keep the pan from melting the synthetic rugs in my car.

Having chewed on this dilemma for a week, I’d about decided to punt with potato salad. Then I flipped open my ancient Beard’s American Cookery, and what should I find but M. Blot’s Recipe for au Gratin Potatoes. This little gem uses precooked potatoes. Not only that, but it turns out to be very easy to prepare—much easier than the traditional lasagna-like layering of potatoes, butter, béchamel sauce, cheese, and crumbs.

And it takes ten minutes flat to warm in a 400-degree oven.

E-mail to the boss: OK to use your oven to heat this thing? Boss to underling: Nooo problem—we have all our ovens at the choir’s disposal.

Though I haven’t tasted this yet, obviously (because the party’s tomorrow), I did prepare it this morning, and it looks delicious. The sauce is splendidly savory.

Here’s my adaptation, enlarged for a crowd:

You need:

6 or 8 boiling potatoes
2 cups milk or 1½ cup milk and ½ cup heavy cream
4 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp flour
4 egg yolks, beaten
cayenne pepper
salt & pepper to taste
a cup or so of shredded cheddar or Gruyère cheese (I combined Irish cheddar with Jarlsburg)
more butter to oil the pan
buttered breadcrumbs

Wash the potatoes but don’t bother to peel them. Bring a big kettle of water to the boil and place the potatoes in it. Cook over medium-high heat until a knife blade can be inserted easily into one of the larger potatoes.

Meanwhile, grate the cheese and beat the four egg yolks.

When the potatoes are done, drain them in a colander. Allow to cool for a few minutes. At this point, the peels will slip right off—so, when the potatoes are cool enough to touch, remove these with your hands and then slice the potatoes fairly thickly.

Butter an oblong baking dish.

Next, make the béchamel sauce.

How to make the béchamel:

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the flour and cook gently, stirring, until the butter foams. Add the milk (or milk + cream) and heat over medium-high heat, stirring frequently and watching, until the sauce thickens. Flavor to taste with cayenne, salt, and pepper. Remove the pan from the heat. With the pan off the heat, stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Now add the grated cheese to the hot sauce and stir well to blend.

All that remains to do is to arrange a layer of about half the sliced, cooked potatoes over the bottom of the baking pan. Spread half of the béchamel-cheese sauce over these, and then layer the rest of the potatoes atop that. Spread the rest of the sauce over the second layer. Finally, top it with buttered bread crumbs.

To cook: heat in a 400-degree oven about ten minutes or until heated through.

Since I expect there’ll be little room in the fridge at 9:00 a.m. and I don’t want anyone stacking stuff on top of the tinfoil-covered pan, I’ll  wrap it in a big plastic bag with several of those cold brick-shaped things, frozen solid. That should keep it cool until it goes in the oven at 11:00.

Voilà! A scrumptious dish guaranteed to turn the best of church ladies green with envy, hand-made by you with almost no hassle.

Yum!

“United We Stand…”

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e-pluribus-unum

Paul Krugman has an interesting and kinda scary article in this morning’s Times. He points out that the biggest threat to our economy right now is not the deficit but the fact that not enough is being done to fight unemployment. Says he, the recent hiring gains have, to date, “brought back fewer than 500,000 of the 8 million jobs lost in the wake of the financial crisis.” In that department, he notes, the Administration is doing way too little.

Eight million jobs gone. Heaven help us!

Krugman says the fairest comparison between our economy and another country’s is not with Greece’s debt-ridden economy but with Japan’s, which has never fully recovered from the deflationary cycle of the 1990s. He lays the blame for Europe’s unrest over national debt issues on the establishment of the euro, whose creation, he observes, “imposed a single currency on economies that weren’t ready for such a move.”

Though you’d never know it by the grocery bills I racked up today, inflation is at a 44-year low, and that is not a good thing. Smart money, fearing deflation will extend the economic slump, is moving out of the stock market and into treasury bonds, perceived as safer than equities.

Come to think of it, this morning my financial manager e-mailed to say they’re moving my investments to a cash position. Let’s hope this time they manage to salvage some of that fund. It hadn’t regained all it lost during the crash, but it had recovered to the point that it might reasonably be expected to support me through old age.

Krugman calls for more aggressive recovery measures, but observes rightly that a new stimulus plan “would have no chance of getting through a Congress that has been spooked by the deficit hawks.”

IMHO, something far more basic is at work here.

America is not going to recover economically as long as we continue on our track toward political schism. That way is the road to ruin. The polarization of our thinking between the extreme right and the extreme left is spinning this country around in circles. Ultimately, it will destroy us. Indeed, I fear that if it continues, within a generation it will lead to uprisings, possibly even civil war.

David Brooks observes, in a column also appearing in today’s Times, that our political center presently “is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.”

In a little parable meant to elucidate the thinking of people who subscribe to the Tea Party, Brooks predicts that just throwing the rascals out and replacing them with new demagogues won’t get us far. “[Brooks’s fictional angry voter] is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. He’s going to find that he and voters like him unwittingly created a political culture in which compromise is impermissible, in which institutions are decimated by lone-wolf narcissists who have no interest in or talent for crafting legislation. Nothing will get done.”

Just so. The motto on our currency and on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum—”out of many, one”—resonates with the last great words of Patrick Henry:

“United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs.”

We’ve forgotten those words. It behooves us to remember them, before it’s too late.

Where Do All the Shoppers Come From?

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Must be payday, that’s the only explanation.

Out of food and out of about everything else, too, I made a long circuit of the globe by way of refilling the freezer, the fridge, and the pantry.

Started around 10:00 ayem at the Sprouts just down the street. Determined to avoid a run on Safeway, I managed to pick up most of the non-Costco food items: cabbage and celery and ground lamb, and to find the shea butter I went there to track down.

The place was overrun with bluehairs. From the minute I walked in to the minute I walked out, flying phalanxes of elderly women made it their business to park themselves and their shopping carts everywhere I went. If I was already where I needed to be, they’d come up and push me out of their way! Have you ever been in a store where you just could. not. get. AWAY. from some annoying customer? One old gal and her hubby fit that bill today. When I walked in the door, she was parked in the bakery section, smack in the middle of the lane that would allow one to get around said department. She was just standing there: not looking at the merchandise, not doing anything…just standing there. So I find another route around, and the next time I look up, there she is again, with her husband’s cart blocking my way! The two of them homed in on me like heat-seeking missiles! Everywhere I went, there they were…parked smack-dab in the middle of the aisle!

Oh well. Thence, on down the road…

Surfaced at Costco shortly after the store opened. Consumed half the month’s gasoline budget at the tanks and then moved on to the store itself.

What a zoo! It was just jammed. This, in the middle of Friday morning. It must be payday. Or Unemployment Insurance benefit day. Where do all these people come from??? When I hit the parking lot, the coast looked clear—I even got a crip space, a miraculous development, since those are almost always occupied. But during the time I circumnavigated the store, the place filled up.

Which reminds me of another funny Sprouts story: As I’m loading groceries into my car, one of my fellow crips comes along and parks his car smack in the middle of the lane, holding up a line of traffic, and waits for me to move so he can grab my crip space. It’s a 100-degree day, and I know the Costco junket will take a good hour, so I’ve brought along a small cold chest and a bunch of those frozen blue cold brick things to keep the Sprouts produce cool. This requires me to take some time to unpack the bags the check-out lady has tossed together, sort the perishables, and fit them into the cool container. Then I have to pack the rest of the stuff into the plastic bins that keep stuff from flying around the back of my van.

The guy stands there and stands there and stands there. His fellow shoppers stacked up behind him stand there and stand there and stand there. I finally climb into the driver’s seat, change into my distance sunglasses so I can drive without killing or crippling some other motorist, and pull out. He races into the vacant spot. The wacky thing about this is that not twenty feet away was another parking spot that was closer to the door! It wasn’t a crip space, though, so I suppose it didn’t meet his exacting requirements.

LOL! Ain’t human nature grand?

By the time I was ready to leave the Costco, check-out lines were halfway back to the far side of the store. Naturally, I picked the line where the guy who was stocking his sports bar with every spirit in the damn store had parked himself in front. Not only did he have to buy every bottle of booze in the house, he had to send his wife back into the store to pick up something else.

While he gassed on and on and on, I moved to another line, where things didn’t move one whit faster. At least the lady who looked like she was buying only one thing but really was waiting for her companion to show up with a truckload of purchases let me go in front of her. Not that it did much good.

Packed as much frozen and perishable stuff into a cold case as I could. Decided against the run on Target, which is always crowded and often nuts. Moved on to Trader Joe’s.

I swear, I have never seen so many people jammed into one building in my life. Here, it was impossible to get a place to park within walking distance. I gave up and parked in the semi-shade of some trees on the far border of the parking lot. Hiked a quarter-mile to the door. The younger set of greenies shops here, while their parents and grandparents hang out at Sprouts. They have their forebears’ manners: if you’re standing in front of a display trying to find, say, the capers, they weasel in front of you to search for what they want, so you can’t see what’s on the shelves. Two women with children encountered each other and parked their kid-ridden carts side by side, coming and going, in the middle of an aisle, yakking companionably while they blocked the way for all comers. When one lady tried to s-q-u-e-e-e-e-e-e-z-e around them, they just ignored her.

Lines were interminable there, too, but miraculously they opened a new line and I got picked to be first! w00t!

Stopped at a Walgreen’s to pick up couple of the Target things I missed by opting that leg of the junket: rubbing alcohol, doggie tennis balls.

Argha! I spent $214 at Costco and about another $75 at the other stores, consuming almost half this month’s budget in one day. But the freezer and fridge are now stuffed and the car is reloaded with gas. With any luck I won’t have to go out again for another two weeks.

Hope not. I hate shopping!

Hmh. Am I alone in that sentiment?