Coffee heat rising

Keep? Or Take It Back?

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So late last week I schlepped to Tempe, there to meet with my friend Tina for lunch and then to get my hair done by a reasonably trustworthy stylist. What I hadn’t counted on: The Mill Avenue Crafts Fair.

Augh! This annual event has bloated into a huge affair that calls vendors from all over the country and shoppers from all over the state, to say nothing of every tourist who’s in town during the high season. Driving around it and getting a place to park is a freaking nightmare.

However…it is kinda fun to stroll around. I like to buy my jewelry (when I buy it, rather than making it myself) from crafters who show up at these fairs, and yea verily! Who should I stumble across but a couple of Polish jewelry-makers who specialize in amber and silver. Aren’t these pretty?

Photo’s not too great—my camera was running out of juice and I got in a hurry. Oh well. Anyway, I needed a new li’l cross for choir, since I gave my good silver and topaz cross to my best friend on the choir at the time I walked away after a visiting cleric remarked that if we didn’t support George Bush’s war in the Middle East and the Israeli agenda, we weren’t good Christians.

Love the design of the earrings, and the cross is kind of unusual but not strange.

These little fellows set me back about $120, which was not a problem because I have plenty in diddle-it-away savings to cover that. Indulgences like this are exactly what the diddle-it-away sinking fund is for. So, no, the baubles are not the issue.

The issue is these…

Naot_Shoes

Yes. I’m afraid so. As long as I was wandering around Mill Avenue, I could hardly not pay a visit to my favorite purveyor of pain-free shoes, the cutesily named Shoe Mill, especially since I happened to have a $20 off coupon. Lo! They were having a 50% off sale!

Nothing that anyone would like to wear in public was part of this sale, and the Naots pictured above were decidedly not on sale. Nooo…. With the $20 off, the tab came to around $160.

Good God! So now I’ve spent something in excess of $300, by the time you figure in the bottle of leather lotion I picked up to treat the outrageously expensive purse I bought there shortly after Canning Day.

Still. I can afford it. Despite last month’s excesses and unexpected expenses, it looks like I’ll end this month about $350 in the black, an amazing feat made possible by a state income tax refund. That money would normally go into the diddle-it-away fund, easily making up for these two little extravagances.

However… My son’s birthday happens in a few days. I would like either to buy him an expensive electronic doodad or to give him the amount it would cost and let him buy whatever doodads he pleases. Or just cash the check as ones, scatter them across the living room floor, and roll in them.

If I keep the shoes, forking over several hundred bucks for a birthday present is going to be a stretch. The Shoe Mill has a generous return policy, and so I could burn a quarter-tank of gas to trek back out to Tempe and get my money back. On the other hand, I need a pair of summer shoes. My favorite summery shoes are an old pair of Naots whose cork soles are crumbling and shedding little pieces. And the new Naots would look awesome with this dress from J. Jill:

I want that dress. I don’t have any light-colored shoes to go with it. So of course I need the silver Naot sandals. Don’t I?

I could take the shoes back, refrain from buying the linen summer dress, and save about $280, which could then be expended upon my son. Or not.

It should be borne in mind that the feds owe me $3004 for the 2010 tax refund, which should be dropping out of the ether into my checking account pretty quick now. So really, I could pay for all of this out of savings and the refund without draining diddle-away savings to naught. On the other hand, that would leave significantly less than $3000 to put into the short-term survival fund, which is supposed to carry me through until the end of 2012 without taxable drawdowns from investments.

Realistically, between now and then I probably could scrounge $280 from various frugalities to replace the money in the survival fund. Assuming I remember to do so, and assuming I work that hard at pinching pennies. Or maybe not so realistically: pretty soon the Dog Chariot will need a new timing belt: $340.

So...what to do, what to do?

What say you? Return the shoes? Or indulge?

Can You Support Your Parents?

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Lenten thanks, Day 18

Thank God for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So the Republicans are getting ready to go after Social Security and Medicare. Some of their followers don’t even seem to be rational. Here’s one who remarks that if Social Security goes, “no one is going to be hurt by it.”

Yeah. No one but the kids.

You know, if it were not for Social Security, I could not stay in my home. I wouldn’t be able to pay the property taxes, and pretty soon the County would come and evict me. I would be living on the streets right now, today. The house my son is living in would have been foreclosed by now, since without my salary and Social Security, we wouldn’t have a hope of making payments on the upside-down mortgage. And that is with a retirement nest egg that’s 3.3 times larger than the average 50- to 60-year-old’s.

In a culture where families fly apart as the kids reach adulthood, where the elderly are objects of disdain and discrimination, where you’ll have a tough time getting a job if you’re laid off at 45 and no chance at all if you’re in your 60s, where a man is considered not a man if his mother lives with him, where the elderly are expected to live on their own until they’re sent off to a nursing home, who exactly is going to take care of the old folks when they can no longer work?

Without Social Security and Medicare, my choices would be to depend on my son to house me, feed me, and cover my healthcare costs or to live on the street until I die, which would happen in short order. Ours is not a culture like Revanche’s, where young people expect to care for their parents no matter how much strain it puts on their own lives. Most Americans would expect their parents and troublesome siblings to fend for themselves.

This is true for a large portion of the elderly in our country. Get rid of the so-called “entitlement” programs—into which we have paid all our lives—and you’ll end up consigning huge numbers of older Americans to dire poverty. Responsibility for supporting them will fall to their adult children, who don’t have the resources to care for elderly, unemployable parents.

Will you be willing to take your parents in after they can no longer work? Oh, you say you don’t want Mom and Dad living in your spare bedroom? You don’t want them in your face all day, every day, telling you how to raise your kids and how to live your life. Well, then, are you prepared to pay their rent? Can you cover the property taxes on their paid-off home?

And when you discover the cat food in the pantry (they don’t have a cat, interestingly enough), will you shell out a couple hundred a month to buy groceries for them? When you find out that they’re too frail to get groceries for themselves, will you run to the grocery store once or twice a week and stock up on microwavable food for them?

Are you willing to pay for your parents’ healthcare? Sure you are. But can you? Can you afford to buy insurance for an elderly person who already has chronic health problems? And if they can’t get insurance at all (which they can’t, because of the chronic health issues), are you in a position to pay for their health care out of pocket? You do know, no doubt, how much treatment for a heart condition costs?

How many of you who are younger and midlife adults see yourselves, seriously, as willing and able to care for your parents when they get too old work? Take a look at these excellent young people who are coming up behind you…see any of them planning to support Mom and Dad in old age?

In the post linked above, Revanche asks readers if they have a plan for taking care of their parents when the old folks can no longer care for themselves. Do you? If you’re under about 35 or 40, you’d better get one.

And by the way, who’s going to support you when you get too old or sick to work, and the stock market crashes right at the moment when you can no longer hold down a job?

Image: Elephant near Ndutu Lodge. nickandmel2006. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Asparagus cheese torte!

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Lenten thanks, Day 17

LOL! Thanks, God, for making us hungry and providing plenty of delicious veggies for us to deal with that. Oh yeah: and for coming up with that fire thing so we can cook the stuff.

Now, I ripped this idea off from a recent issue of Sunset magazine. The original had a different variety of cheese—don’t remember which, but it was something melty like gruyère or Emmenthaler. I happen to have a wheel of brie sized to feed a small army, courtesy of Costco, home of the Lifetime Supply of Just About Anything. From the same bottomless well came a gigantic package of lovely crisp spring asparagus. And deep in the freezer lurked the remains of a package of frozen puff pastry; in the fridge, some leftover caramelized onion.

Here’s how this goes:

You need…

• Some sort of delicious, meltable cheese
• A fistful of asparagus
• A little butter
• A little olive oil
• Maybe a little nutmeg
• Sautéed onions, if you so desire
• Frozen puff pastry dough
• Flour for rolling out the pastry dough
• A small oven-proof vessel sized to fit the amount of ingredients you have.

Preheat the oven to around 375 degrees.

IngredientsAsparagusTorte

Break the asparagi into pieces that will fit into whatever you’re going to cook with; ideally, leave them long, but if push comes to shove, snap them into pieces.

Place the asparagus on a little dish, dribble some olive oil over it, sprinkle on some nutmeg (probably optional; you could use tarragon, or nothing), and roll it all around to coat the veggies.

Defrost the pastry dough (I did this in the microwave: about 20 seconds at medium on one side; 10 seconds on the other). Flour a pastry board and roll out the pastry so you can cover the bottom and (ideally) the sides of your cooking vessel. Line the vessel with this stuff; you may want to butter the pan or pottery first.

Slice the cheese and layer it over the pastry. Next time, I think I’d pre-bake the pastry shell for 8 or 10 minutes to crisp it up, but it probably doesn’t matter much. If you try that and you have enough pastry to make a rim around the dish (I didn’t, here), you may have to cover the rim with a little tinfoil to keep it from over-darkening.

Place the onions, if you so choose, over the cheese.

Finally layer on the nicely oiled asparagi.

Place this lovely little package into the hot oven and let it cook until the cheese is exquisitely melted, about 20 minutes (for brie, anyway).

Serve with some wonderful bread.

AsparagusBrieTorte
Ready to pop in the oven!

Who, Me? Rich? What does it mean to be rich, anyway?

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Lenten thanks: Day 16 (I expect)

Thank God for real wealth.

I much enjoyed reading a recent post on Intelligent Speculator, whose proprietor asks readers what they consider to be “rich.” It’s a great question, and it elicits an amazing range of answers in the comments section.

IS remarks, interestingly, “I will consider myself as rich when my monthly passive income will be enough to pay for my expenses.” That’s a pretty good answer, IMHO. But it poses another question: what d’you mean by “expenses”? How much do you figure it will cost for you to support yourself in the manner to which you intend to become accustomed?

Experience suggests that if you appreciate what true wealth is, it doesn’t take anywhere near as many dollars to cover reasonable expenses as many of us think. This year, assuming all my classes make, I will be living on about 70 percent of the relatively modest amount I earned at the Great Desert University. I expect to be very comfortable. If I didn’t have to chip in on the evil mortgage, I could make do just as comfortably on about 57 percent of former earnings. And believe me, my salary did not come anywhere near what most of you would think of as “good” pay.

So what’s true wealth? Probably varies by the person. In my universe, true wealth is having the basic amenities that make you comfortable—a paid-off roof over your head, food on your table, a way to get around your town or city—and then the things that make you happy: good friends, family members who don’t make you crazy, decent health, a capacity to care about others, moments of fun, and an appreciation for the beauty around you.

You don’t really need anything more. Whatever you accrue beyond that, especially in currency, is superfluous. It’s not wealth. It’s junk. You could give it away or throw it away and not change your well-being.

Here are some examples of real wealth…

Family, Fun

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Good Friends

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A life in fellowship

Crafty furbelows

Cassie

Good food


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An amazing world

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Another Day, Another Dollar…Another Few Dollars Lighter

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Well, this has been quite the day.

The accursed virus that grabbed me by the throat worked itself up to a high pitch last night. Finally got to sleep little after 5:00 a.m.; the alarm jangled at 6:00 to start a day filled with chores that could not be evaded.

First, it was off to Scottsdale for a presentation to my business group’s 7:15 breakfast meeting. That went better than expected. I pitched the idea of buying ad space on Funny. People actually seemed to be interested, giving me some hope that this scheme could work. I think I’ll have to reach a wider audience of businessmen and women, though—possibly try to deliver the same pitch at the Chamber or other networking groups.

From there, it was down to the client’s office to drop off another set of edited page proofs. Back to my house to call the doctor’s office and then like a rocket to the campus.

Adjunct faculty get no sick leave. If you’re not there, your pay is docked; that you’re pounding on death’s door is beside the point. Because all my face-to-face classes meet on the same days—Tuesdays and Thursdays—if I canceled classes today I would lose one fourth of my pay this period!

Obviously, I can’t afford to have my paycheck cut by 25 percent. So I dragged out there and laid some busywork on the kiddies, sending them to the library to kill time. This left two hours until the second class, allowing me to drive home and try to sleep a little. Naturally this was mooted when the doctor’s nurse called me back. I had to explain that I am not going to make a two-hour round-trip drive to the Mayo only to be told that yes, I have a cold. She was able to figure that out over the phone, and said they’d call a prescription in to the Safeway pharmacy.

Back to campus; deliver the same message to the second section; shovel them out the door. Flee!

Flat out of food for Cassie; last night I cooked her a piece of steak. That not being a viable proposition for the long term, I had to drive by the Costco to pick up one of their roast chickens, which will last her a week and give me something to eat, too.

It’s 10.8 miles from the Costco near campus to the Safeway nearest to my house. Needless to say, every light turned red as I drove up to it, all the way from the campus to the Costco and from the Costco to the Safeway…just as every light had turned red while I was traipsing from the west side of Phoenix to uptown Scottsdale to downtown Scottsdale and back, about 15 miles each way.

Arrived at the Safeway, stood in line (enduring the dirty looks of fellow customers as I hacked and coughed), only to learn that they never heard of me. The doctor’s office had never phoned in. Pharmacist said she would call if and when the prescription was called in. I said I was not dragging back over there this afternoon, because it is unsafe for me to be behind the wheel of an automobile.

Jayzus! In the state I’m in, it’s a miracle I didn’t kill someone. On the other hand, given the number of morons who wove back and forth in front of me and beside me while they yakked on their phones, maybe one could say it’s too bad I didn’t kill one of them.

Moving on… I picked up a pint of berry sherbet, figuring to anaesthetize my tonsils by freezing them. It worked, too. Briefly.

Late this afternoon, the doctor’s nurse said he had called in a prescription for Flonase. A day late and a dollar short, sister!

My car is now down a quarter-tank of gas. That puts the eefus on my gasoline budget. There’s no way I can run that boat from now until the end of the current billing cycle—April 21—on just one more fill-up. The three-quarters of a tank I had to buy on Monday cost $53, more than half the monthly budget.

Interesting how even a minor ailment drains your pocketbook, isn’t it? If I hadn’t forced myself to put in an appearance on the campus—done at some risk to life and limb, since I really should not have been driving—I would have lost about $120. The pharmacist suggested that I try the syrup form of Mucinex DM, which she thinks gets into some people’s systems more efficiently. So now I have two bottles of the generic form of that (rather useless!) stuff, one full of horse-pills and one full of cherry syrup. I wouldn’t have bought the sherbet if my throat didn’t feel like someone stuck a blowtorch down it. The extra round trip between campus and home plus the unplanned trip to the Safeway guaranteed that I’ll have to spend more than $100 on gas this month.

As a practical  matter, the common cold costs the U.S. economy big-time. In 2003, a University of Michigan study alleged that the combined annual cost of all our colds is around $40 billion a year, “substantially more than other conditions such as asthma, heart failure and emphysema.” As a group, we Americans were spending $2.9 billion annually on OTC nostrums and another $400 million on prescription drugs for symptomatic relief, and wasting $1.1 billion on antibiotics, which have no effect on viral illnesses like colds.

I haven’t bought the prescription yet and may not. Its common side effects include dizziness, headache, nasal irritation or burning, nausea, nosebleed, sore throat, and vomiting. The only one of those I don’t already have is throwing up, and I don’t think I need it, either. So that’ll be a few bucks saved.

What gets into doctors? Do they not have access to the Internet? How hard is it to type “Flonase side effects” into a search engine? For that matter, how hard is it to read the manufacturer’s notice, posted prominently online: “you should know that fluticasone [i.e., Flonase] may decrease your ability to fight infection”? The stuff is indicated for allergic rhinitis, not colds, a condition that itself comes under the heading of “infection.”

Anyway, between the schlepping around and the expenditures on OTC drugs and the potential cost of a contraindicated prescription drug, I’ve probably spent as much as I saved by forcing myself to traipse to the campus through a rhinovirus haze.