Coffee heat rising

w00t! Money about to happen?

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So I’m sitting here sweltering through a crush of semester-end stoont papers when what should pop up in the e-mail but a last-minute call for someone to teach a humanities course in the first summer session at a different campus in the community college district. Money happens!

Now at last, folks, we’re talkin’ fair wage: a summer session runs for five weeks; $2,400 for a month and a week of light work comes under the heading of decent pay. Although my Ph.D. is in English, not humanities per se,  my undergraduate degree is in French language and literature. “Humanities” is a vague term that used to mean “classics” but now means almost nothing—as a practical matter, colleges will hire people with almost any degree in the liberal arts to teach these courses. And the beauty of these courses is that assessment can be largely through online tests. Naturally, one would like to assign a term paper or a couple of shorter papers, but they don’t have to be parsed for mechanics and style. People grade these things on the basis of whether the student seems to have responded to the assignment and done the reading, rather than for the student’s writing skill.

Piece. of. cake.

It would push me over the Social Security earnings limit by about $350. More than that, really, because I’ll have to take a “salary” from the S-corporation in December. However, it could be worth it: barring another market crash, I’ll have enough cash to weather a month without the Social Security payment (loss of which is one of the consequences of exceeding the limit).

More to the point, we don’t know that either of the two courses I’m lined up to teach in the fall will make. They’re set up as two eight-week sessions, back-to-back, English 101 first followed by an online feature-writing course. The idea that a freshman comp student will sign up to sit through two three-hour sessions a week verges on the preposterous. And the feature-writing course will follow a nearly identical in-class section a colleague will teach in the first half of the semester.

BTW, if anyone would like to sign up for that feature-writing class (it’s billed as “magazine writing”), it’s 100 percent online, and there’s no out-of-state tuition for online courses. If you’re a blogger, I probably would accept posts that fit the parameters of the assignments—these will include things like a profile, a straight report, an opinion piece, a brite, a how-to, a round-up, or whatever else I can dream up. The course is English 235, Magazine Article Writing; it runs from 10/18 to 12/10/2010. You can register online; from what I can tell, you need to start by getting admitted through this site. There’s a phone number: 602-787-7020.

Anyway, back on topic: I’m less than thrilled at the prospect of working away half the first real summer break I’ve had in 20 years. On the other hand, trying to get through the summer on less than half the income I’ve had this semester is a little scary, plus next fall’s semester will pay $2,400 less than I’ve been earning. The hot season pushes utility and water bills through the roof, and that coincides perfectly with the switch to Medicare, which also will elevate my health coverage bills significantly.

I’m thinking it may be worth having a month’s worth of Social Security taxed at 50%. From what I’m told, the minute the IRS finds out you’re going to exceed the annual earnings limit, they withhold an entire month’s SS benefit. From that they subtract the amount they figure you owe in the tax rip-off—but you don’t get the remainder of the money back until the following January! So the punishment for exceeding the earnings limit is effectively the loss of a full month’s SS income. That’s pretty hefty, when it represents half your net income.

But it may be worth it, to be sure there’s enough to live on over the summer. Maybe.

It LIVES!

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So SDXB came through the gerzillion-bypass surgery with flying colors. They dissected him yesterday; today he he’s been up walking around twice, and he socialized so exuberantly with all his relatives that his sister (who runs the tribe) had to send them all out of the place so he would settle down and sleep. New Girlfriend went off to transport a recliner from her palace to his—oddly for such an Archie Bunker sorta guy, he’s never had a classic Naugahyde recliner (or any other kind of recliner).

SiS (Sister-in-Sin) sent a photo, saying he looks “cute”…

Except for all the gear attached to him, the old buzzard looks almost normal. It’s amazing, isn’t it, what medical science can do? Now if we can just manage to get access to it…

SDXB has a combination of military retiree coverage and Medicare, which should pretty well cover what probably is something over a hundred grand worth of surgery and treatment.

BiS, the eminent cardiac anaesthesiologist, says the reason SDXB was navigating pretty normally despite a chestful of clogged arteries is most likely is steady, vigorous exercise. He climbs the hills in the local mountain parks, hikes, walks, bicycles, and swims—a day never goes by when he doesn’t get some kind of exercise. As it develops, exercise causes your body to develop new blood vessels around the heart, and that probably is how blood was getting to his heart. BiS also learned that apparently SDXB’s heart itself is not damaged. So assuming he recovers from the surgery without complication, he should be OK. In fact, he should be better than OK.

I hope that New Girlfriend will stay around over the summer. She has a home in Colorado, where she usually decamps to escape the heat—he had planned to spend part of the summer there, in between junkets to Michigan, Canada, and the Pacific Southwest. In spite of SDXB’s apparent vigor, I’m afraid it will take two or three months before he’s back to normal, and somebody needs to be in the offing during that time.

The daughters discovered that both his insurance plans provide in-home care, though it remains to be seen whether he’ll be incapacitated enough to qualify (usually you must need help in several living tasks, such as dressing, bathing, feeding, toileting). If he can get someone in to help, that would be good. Otherwise…it’s 19.44 miles from my house to his. {sigh}

At any rate, the guy’s a poster boy for daily exercise. If he hadn’t kept himself in the kind of shape he’s in, he’d have croaked over long ago.

Link Love…

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Between the semester-end deluge of student papers and SDXB’s illness, there hasn’t been a lot of time to write. But browsing other blogs seems to be irresistible, no matter how pressed for time you are! Over the last few days I’ve stumbled upon a few gems. Check these out:

Simple Life in France put up a guest post at Money Funk on the question of whether the $8,000/year average tuition for private schools is worth it. Simple Life is fast becoming one of my favorite bloggers because of the excellence of her writing. Add her engagement in an interesting life experience, and you have the perfect mix for a daily blog.

Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has as its interesting premise the idea that a good frugal budget should include some room for things that give you pleasure—even some pretty pricey things. I got a hoot out of a recent post discussing things she and DH (and readers!) don’t skimp on.

A Gai Shan Life is the story of a young woman whose life is an ongoing drama. It’s fascinating stuff, and along the way she wrestles with financial and life issues that all of us are either dealing with now or soon or later will have to deal with. Recently she observed that her new coworkers display an alarming tendency to workaholism, leading to a post that spawned a slew of comments on the subject.

One of my perennial favorites is Frugal Scholar, who’s been in the same game I have for about as long and whose running commentary on life, the universe, and all that I find endlessly sympathique. Today she’s set me off with a post describing a guy who made a nice pile of money when he sold a successful business and then went back to graduate school, working for slave wages as a T.A.  Touches on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, the exuberant exploitation of graduate students and employees common to all universities.

I always watch for Room Farm‘s posts. She was much missed while she was out struggling with cancer treatment. This is freaking hilarious!

Simply Forties, a single woman who sold her home to take off on a long life adventure, is given to publishing THE most incredible recipes, as well as interesting ruminations like this one on Kindle, books and libraries.

Mrs. Accountability is one of the few women PF bloggers who live here in lovely uptown Arizona. I think she must live in a semirural area, because she describes what sounds like a big lot with a magnificent garden. Of late, she’s been ruminating about her credit score, whose mysterious decline led to some interesting discoveries about how those things are calculated.

Oh, my… It’s getting late and I have to get ready to go to class. Amazing how fast time passes when you’re reading about other peoples’ lives, isn’t it?

Sad news

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Yesterday SDXB went into the hospital for an angiogram. He’d been having some mild shortness of breath, which he put down to a hangover from a severe respiratory infection he’d had a couple of months ago. The doctor, however, thought otherwise: he diagnosed it as angina, but given SDXB’s vigor and overall physical condition, he thought probably treatable with an angioplasty or a stent. He even said it was possible the examination would find nothing.

In the afternoon, New Girlfriend called to report the amazingly bad news: the arteries on the right side of his heart are 70 percent blocked; on the left, 100 percent. The doctors were astonished that he hadn’t already had a heart attack and immediately put him on support to stave one off. They want to do a multiple bypass—and by “multiple,” we mean “quadruple” may be an understatement—and they plan to do it today or, at latest, tomorrow.

It’s hard to believe. The man is not just active; he’s athletic. This guy hikes up and down mountains several times a week. When he’s not climbing, he’s swimming laps in an Olympic-sized pool, bicycling twenty or thirty miles from Sun City into Phoenix and then bicycling back, hunting, fishing, camping, or taking long walks around town. He hasn’t smoked in thirty or forty years, he doesn’t eat junk food, he drinks moderately (of late…most of the time), he keeps his blood pressure under control.

New Girlfriend, present when this news was delivered, was unnerved. A recent widow, she’s already seen one husband and a son into the grave, and she doesn’t relish going through that again.

Everyone else is unnerved, too. Sister-in-Sin is on her way to Phoenix at this moment, as is Sane Daughter. Both are extremely competent women; the daughter is a nurse, and the sister, the wife of the pre-eminent cardiac anaesthesiologist in the Northwest. I don’t know how long his daughter will be able to stay here, since she has a full-time job and a family. But his sister probably can hang in for the duration.

Given that he is pretty fit—except for the fact that he’s about to keel over dead—maybe he’ll recover fully, and maybe he’ll spring back in three months or so. It’s extreme surgery, and IMHO dubious in some cases. Circulatory disease is not limited to the arteries around the heart. My father told me, after his triple bypass, that if he had known how much he was going to suffer for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t have called for help when he had his heart attack. But he was 80 when he went under the knife; SDXB is only 70. And at 80, my father was no athlete.

So, we shall see. I hope SDXB’s health and active lifestyle aren’t ruined.

In an unguarded moment, NG remarked that they had discussed marriage and she had told him that after what she’d been through with her husband, she didn’t want ever to marry again, because she didn’t want to care for and watch another man die. But now, she said to me, she was pulled into it.

Exactly so. Few women will admit it publicly, but that’s a large reason many active, lively older women don’t take on new spouses late in life. It certainly is the main factor in my lackluster interest in men. I watched what happened to my stepmother after she married my father.

My mother died in April, when my father was 70 years old. By December, Helen had him at the altar. She was a very active, social woman who loved to travel, loved concerts, loved church-going. My father had seen the world, thank you, and couldn’t see any sense in leaving a perfectly good home to go gadding around expensively. A committed atheist, he wouldn’t go near a church and thought anyone who did was a superstitious fool. He called classical music “piddly-piddly music” and loathed sitting through a concert.

Helen’s first husband, a coronary invalid, had died of a massive heart attack while she was off leading a bus tour. She never got over the feeling of guilt for not having been at his side when he died. So, as my father grew weaker and sicker—he also became a coronary invalid—her life grew more and more constrained. They lived in a three-room apartment in a life care community. I can’t imagine—make that “don’t want to imagine”—being trapped with my father in three tiny rooms, month after month after month.

She spent the last few good years of her life dutifully taking care of a sick, unhappy, cranky old man. By the time he passed, there was nothing left for her. She was a mental wreck, and her physical health was pretty well wrecked, too.

They were married for about 14 years. Eight or nine of those were years in which Helen was still vigorous enough to continue her active, outgoing lifestyle. But that came to an end within two or three years after they married. Long before he was hit with a heart attack, my father was unable to do much. By marrying him, she traded her vigorous, if sometimes lonely, life for one as an unpaid nurse and maid. She sacrificed the last good years of her life to take care of a man who secretly wanted to divorce her.

I hope she never realized that last bit.

That sacrifice is necessary and maybe even fine if you’ve been married to a man for thirty, forty, fifty years and you have a lifetime commitment. But not so much when it’s someone you’ve met late in life, when really what you’re looking for is not to build a family but to have someone to go out to dinner and a movie with. There are worse things than loneliness. Way worse.

Old age is not for the faint of heart. That’s for sure.

Update: SDXB himself just called on the phone, sounding as bushy-tailed as usual. He said the docs have moved the surgery up to 9:00 this morning. He didn’t sound too depressed; thankful, maybe, that this discovery was made before he had a heart attack. It’s possible the heart itself is not damaged, which would mean he may make a good recovery. Brother-in-Sin is also headed into town, an excellent development: Arizona’s hospitals leave a lot to be desired, and this guy, an eminent member of the doctors’ club, will ride herd on what’s going on there.

The future of residential real estate

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Several weeks ago, one of the longtime choir members passed away. A widower, he lived in the neighborhood, in a very nice 1950s home just one lot away from the park. He probably was the original owner.

At least three adult children were at the memorial service. The house has not gone up for sale. Sometimes you see lights in the place at night. So it’s possible that one of the kids is living in it. Or it’s possible that the heirs are still trying to straighten out the estate and so aren’t selling the place until they reach some agreement on the distribution of the proceeds.

If I had several children and were affluent enough to live in that area, I’d probably will the house to the one who most needed a nice place to live and then distribute the rest of the estate fairly to the rest of them.

Just now I know of at least four houses in the neighborhood where people have died or gone off to the nursing home and family have moved in. One couple with a baby had moved into her parents’ home and assumed the mortgage some time before the crash. In the ensuing deprecession, they both lost their jobs. She started baking incredibly rich cookies and peddling them through farmer’s markets and gourmet grocery stores; although the enterprise took off and has now gone national through the Internet, it still doesn’t match what they earned when they both had full-time jobs. She said they managed to get by because the mortgage payments were very low, compared to what they would have been paying had they bought a newer place.

Another couple moved into her mother’s house with their two kids. That house was paid off, a true windfall for the young family. And a friend of La Maya and La Bethulia’s, now withering away in Hospice, had “sold” her long paid-off home to her daughter; to keep it legal, she was making “rent” payments to the daughter. The daughter and her husband, who live in Alaska, plan to keep the house to use as a winter home.

In all three cases, owners had bought the houses so long ago that even at today’s depressed prices the places would have sold at a considerable profit. All three houses are in neighborhoods where prices are not especially depressed, anyway. If any amount remained on the mortgage, the payments were ludicrously low compared to what you’d pay to buy the house.

I suspect this is going to develop into a pattern. Real estate, despite the drop in prices, is out of sight and unaffordable for many young people. Policy-makers are beginning to talk about encouraging people to rent rather than to try to buy property, and after the late, great housing crash, many people in their 20s and 20s see little sense in throwing money into residential property. Still, most Americans would still rather own a house than rent an apartment, and talk notwithstanding, some see evidence that over time, owning works better financially.

It makes sense, then, that if a parent’s home is in a livable neighborhood—reasonably safe with access to an adequate public or even private school—the heirs would want to keep the house in the family. If it’s paid off, with the savings you could put your child in a private or parochial school, rendering the quality the local public schools moot.

So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more younger families moving into deceased parents’ homes. As the baby boomers start to pass, this could become a trend.

Drummers

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Often at night, when Cassie the Corgi and I are strolling, we can hear someone in the park banging a drum. The sound is steady, fast, monotone, and it reverberates through the neighborhood: boomboomboomboomboomboom.

Since I don’t go in or even near the park after sundown, I’ve thought it was some New Age nut case drumming up the Earth Mother or resonating to herb-induced vibrations. From several blocks away, the sound is eerie and vaguely spooky.

Ah, but no! Yesterday afternoon we went over to the park shortly before sunset. It was a gorgeous evening, a near-full moon already high in the turquoise east as the sun prepared to bed down in the magenta west. And a steady thrumming called.

As we approached the grassy meadow, what we found was not one drummer but four: a drum circle! In the shade of a spreading elm, four American Indians—a man, a very gravid woman, a boy about eight, and a younger man about sixteen—sat on the ground. The older man was pounding the deep-voiced drum that rumbles through the surrounding streets. The boy played a smaller drum, and the teenager accompanied them with a pair of gourd rattles. The man was chanting, just loud enough to be heard in one corner of the park.

Wonder! What a find!

It’s why I love my neighborhood. You’d never hear that in an HOA. You’d never hear it in Sun City. In these beleaguered parts, HOA’s have taken to suing people whose homes have been foreclosed, trying to suck continuing payments out of them for vacant properties. Give me Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum any day…and along with him, I’ll take the Indian drum circle, thank you.