Coffee heat rising

Odorless, stingless sunscreen

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Yesterday while I was rummaging through one of the drawers that needs to be cleaned out, I came across a small tube of sunscreen that I’d bought at the Mayo Clinic’s pharmacy several years ago. Shortly after I’d bought it, I’d “put it away” (read “tossed it in the drawer where it got lost”) and forgotten about it.

Well, the AlphaHydrox I ordered from Amazon.com after the RoC fiasco arrived in the mail. It’s working exactly the same as it did when I first used it: it seems to smooth the wrinkles a little bit, helps with the surface-of-Mars effect, and doesn’t irritate unduly. But as with the retinoids, you really should wear a sunscreen when you’re using alpha-hydroxy acids on your skin, because they can predispose you to sunburn.

I’ve been using Neutrogena’s Ultra-Sheer Dry Touch sunblock, because it’s less obnoxious than most drugstore sunscreens and doesn’t contain PABA, which irritates my skin. Even though its scent is not too strong, it still does stink. I really dislike stuff that’s full of industrial perfume, and of all the industrial perfumes out there, the ones that make you smell like a beach bunny annoy me more than any. This is not something I want to smear on my face and arms every day of my life.

When I spotted the Mayo’s SPF 35 sunscreen, I thought, “I’ll bet this doesn’t stink.” Dab it on and yup! That’s so. Hallelujah! It not only doesn’t make you smell like you just came from the pool or the beach, it doesn’t make your skin sting, either. The stuff is called Vanicream Sensitive Skin Sunscreen, and it contains 8% zinc oxide and 7.5% octinoxate. Unlike other zinc oxide products I’ve used, the “circus clown white” effect rubs in quickly and easily.

Normally I don’t wear much sunscreen, relying instead on clothing, makeup, and a hat to provide sun protection. During the summer, I usually restrict swimming to early morning and after dark. This is partly because PABA, which is no longer used, was quite irritating to my skin and partly because there is some controversy over the use of any sunscreens.

In the first place, humans produce vitamin D through their skin when exposed to sunlight. This is our major source of vitamin D, which is needed to metabolize calcium. Without adequate vitamin D, your bones weaken and voilà! Ostopenia, osteoporosis! Sunblocks (such as zinc oxide) inhibit your body’s ability to make vitamin D, because (obviously) they block your skin’s access to sunlight.

And in the second place, far from preventing skin cancer, sunscreen use has been associated with an increase in malignant melanoma. The products apparently don’t protect against the development of skin cancer as well as people imagine, but because we think we’re protected, we spend more time in the noonday sun than any Englishman or mad dog should.

Thus as you can see, the trick is not to smear chemicals on your skin, but simply to stay out of the sun, except for a few minutes each day specifically for the purpose of metabolizing vitamin D. You need less than 30 minutes of exposure to sunlight twice a week to produce adequate levels. It’s also possible to take vitamin D orally, to good effect in most circumstances.

IMHO, you’re better off to limit sun exposure to just enough to produce a decent amount of vitamin D (which depends on your ethnicity and skin color), to consume vitamin D-fortified dairy products, and to enjoy some salmon now and then. Here in Arizona, I generally wear a wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves even in 110-degree heat (make that especially in 100-degree heat—lightweight cotton or linen actually makes you feel cooler by shading your skin from the sun’s direct blast) and confine my outdoor activities to times when the sun is close to the horizon or below it. I carry a straw hat in the car, so there’ll always be one at hand, and I also leave a big sombrero hanging in the garage for gardening.

Vanicream is not cheap—$14 for four ounces, pretty bracing when you learn that if you’re running around in a bathing suit you should smear a whole ounce of it on yourself. But I figure as long as you’re using a product that could your make skin sun-sensitive, it’s worth it for the face and the age-spot-prone hands and forearms.

Taxpayer confusion

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Damn, but I wish Congress and the IRS wouldn’t let corporate lobbyists make hash out of the tax code so the rich folks can get out of paying. If you have several different kinds of income, it is just flicking impossible to understand tax forms and what you’re supposed to do to pay fairly. What excuse is there for this mess?

This spring, for the first time since I started paying my own taxes (as opposed to the ex-husband doing it), I owe money: $770 to the IRS! This happened because, when ASU started jacking us around with furloughs, I added two allowances to my W-4 so as to minimize damage from the $480/month cut in pay. After six months, the furloughs went away but I didn’t change the withholding.

Meanwhile, I taught two classes in the fall, hustled a lot of freelance business, began to make money on FaM, and also withdrew $800 a month from an IRA to cover my share of the mortgage on the downtown house, yielding a pretty plump gross income. As a result, not enough was withheld to cover federal taxes. On the other hand, the state of Arizona owes me $1004.

It remains to be seen whether the state will issue refunds. Tax Lawyer says her understanding is that they will, but others have heard that we’ll be getting refunds in the form of useless IOUs. Meanwhile, TL charged me $476 to do my personal return and $442 for the corporate return.

Holy mackerel! She’s never charged more than about $350 before. I realize lawyers have to eat, too, but still… The state refund will not cover the federal income tax bill plus TL’s bills.

I can’t even begin to do my personal returns. With income from investments, freelance sources, jobs, Social Security, and limited partnerships offset by itemizing and mortgage interest deductions, the job is just too complicated, because the law is just too complex for me to follow. But I’m pretty sure I can manage the corporate return using Turbotax’s business edition. It’s $150, an amount that has to be ponied up every flickin’ year, but that’s a far cry from $442.

This year my income will drop to about $33,000. TL tells me I should be able to figure out what percentage I’ll owe at the IRS website. Problem is, although Social Security is taxed, it’s not considered earned income. If you add it in to the “earned income” line, the tool calculates an incorrect figure. But it’s not dividend income. It’s taxed in a bizarre way that’s linked to how much you make elsewhere. The complexity of that transaction renders the tool at the IRS site useless.

I think that if I teach only five classes this year (rather than the previously planned six), I may not owe any taxes on Social Security. The clinker is, though, that the RASL payments (sick-leave payout), even though they’re not considered 2010 income (they were earned while I was working at ASU), may push me above the threshhold. I just don’t know, and I don’t know how to prove to the IRS and Social Security that RASL is not 2010 earned or dividend income.

Meanwhile, I still have two allowances on my community college W-4, something I installed at TL’s advice last fall. So…is the District withholding enough? Who knows? It’s impossible to make an accurate guess.

There’s a tool at Money Chimp that sort of explains tax brackets (as best as one can: your tax is xx% but it’s really not; it’s really probably yy%… Yeah! makes sense).

So, if my teaching income is $12,000 and Social Security is $15,084 and the enforced drawdown from the 403(b) is $6,000, and I can keep the “salary” from The Copyeditor’s Desk down to $500 or $1,000 and I don’t withdraw dividends from CE Desk this year, then my total 2010 gross should come to something between $33,584 and $34,084. That will put me in the 15 percent bracket, with an actual tax of 13.73 percent. If I have to draw $1,000 from CE Desk (an S-corporation), then I’ll be in the 25 percent bracket, BUT my actual tax as percentage of income will still be only 13.8 percent.

Huh?

But then, if only half my Social Security is taxed (that’s one possible scenario), do I enter $26,042 into the calculator? If I’m lucky and none of it is taxed, then should I enter $18,500? And what about the RASL? How do I know? How do I find out?

See what I mean? It just doesn’t make any sense at all. And you can NOT arrive at a credible answer without hiring a tax professional (to the tune of $400+) to figure it out.

At any rate, I need the cash flow from my paychecks and am loath to get rid of the allowances. The fact is, with two allowances the community college district is withholding 15 percent. The feds are withholding 20 percent from Social Security. And Fidelity is withholding 23 percent from the $500 distribution the state is forcing me to take.

If the Money Chimp tool is correct, then I shouldn’t have to change my withholding, even though the college is not extracting enough to cover both federal and state taxes. If the calculator is wrong, I do have some money to pay taxes. Really, I’d prefer not to overpay, partly because of the need to buy groceries, but partly because, if the state is going to start issuing IOUs, I certainly don’t want those SOBs getting any more of my money in advance than I can avoid.

Social Security doesn’t issue anything that looks like a pay statement, so you can’t tell whether they’re sending money to the state. At 20 percent, they probably are, since I asked to have 15 percent withheld. The state gloms a percentage of your federal tax.

I’m thinking I should drop or maybe even eliminate the drawdown from Fidelity. Now that the General Accounting Office has approved my RASL payout, I may not need to keep taking that drawdown. However, RASL is paid out over three years. I don’t know whether the RASL Czar checks each year to be sure you’re still drawing down a so-called “pension” or whether once she’s approved it she just cuts a new check for each year. What would make sense would be to roll the ASU drawdown into my big IRA, which just now is cranking money. If I had, say, $250 paid out to me and then rolled the rest, I’d still have a little pocket change, my taxable income would drop by $3,000, and that would put me solidly in the 15 percent bracket.

The question is…can I get by on $3,000 less?

LOL! You can’t make this stuff up

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Okay, I know that in some ways this isn’t funny, but… hee hee HEEEEE! Just thinking about it reduces me to incoherence.

Especially the part where the reporter says, “The Associated Press could not locate a home telephone number for Wolfe.” Thank heavens! How would you like to have the AP call you for comment on that antic?

Image: Cody Pope, North American Opossum in Winter Coat. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

Sure you wanna go on that cruise?

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The other day while cruising the Web, I stumbled across this bizarre and alarming site, describing some of the things that have happened to people while sailing on cruise ships. It left me thinking I’m glad to stick to metaphorical cruising!

As it develops, sovereignties and courts of law apparently have little jurisdiction over what happens on the high seas. Read one or two of these stories and you think, “Naaaah… This person is some sort of complainer.” But when you read a bunch of them, you see a consistency in what they’re saying: rapes, molestations, injuries, deaths (some evidently resulting from foul play) going unreported and uninvestigated, sick people being dumped ashore in Third-World ports. So many themes keep repeating, it’s hard not to take them seriously.

It reminds me of an experience my ex- and I had aboard a Royal Caribbean ship. We spent about three months in England while I worked on my dissertation—he used the project as an excuse to take a “sabbatical” from his law firm and came with me. To get home, our travel agent decided we should take a cruise ship from Dover to London…in the middle of December.

I recall having some vague misgivings, though I didn’t do a lot of thinking while I was married. Most of the time, I just went along for the ride.

And what a ride it was!

The North Atlantic is given to fierce and terrifying storms during the winter. Remember, I grew up with a man who was a sea captain. My father sailed with the Merchant Marine almost all his adult life (when he wasn’t in the Navy and the Coast Guard). We had always lived next to one sea or another. So I knew something about the ocean, mostly because he had taught me by tutoring me with his Bowditch, a thousand-page-long manual for mariners. I knew the Atlantic could be rough at that time of year, but (stupidly) I figured if it was unsafe for civilians they wouldn’t be running passenger ships across it in December.

Come to find out, the reason we were offered the “bargain” price our agent obtained was that Royal Caribbean would not normally offer transatlantic cruises at that time that time. The ship was being moved from Europe to North America simply to get it into the Caribbean, where they wanted to put it to work in the high season there. Rather than run it empty and lose money, the Scandinavian company that owned the line sold space at low rates. They did not give one thin damn about the safety or comfort of the people they suckered into this cruise.

After we were fully out to sea, we ran into a major storm. The seas began to get rough and before long were running very high. Waters were covered with spume, the air grayed-out with spray, and huge waves were breaking not just across the bow but over the bow, over the deck, and as high as the bridge. Water was crashing into the windows around the passenger lounge, which itself was fairly high above the main deck.

Passengers were grayed-out, too: almost all of them laid up with seasickness. I don’t normally suffer from any kind of motion sickness, but even I was so queasy I had to spend most of a day or two in a bunk. Understand, a passenger ship is designed to resist rolling and pitching specifically so that passengers will be insulated from motion sickness. When a lot of people are getting sick, the ship is wallowing in a bad way—indicating the ship itself is in a bad way.

About halfway across, the captain decided to heave to. He didn’t actually stop the ship, I don’t think, but he slowed its speed as far as he could without shutting down the engines. He claimed it was because the winds were pushing us west at a rate that would get us to New York several days ahead of schedule, and the company couldn’t afford the docking fees if they put into port early. Although the fee part probably was true, there was nothing to stop him from standing off shore a day, where at least we would have been within reach of a Coast Guard cutter had the ship started to take on water. The fact was, he simply couldn’t make much headway through such high seas, and he probably slowed in order to take the waves at a more stately and slightly safer pace.

Wind speed at sea is measured according to the Beaufort scale. I happened to know about the Beaufort scale from studying my father’s Bowditch, and from observing storms in the Persian Gulf and off the coast of San Francisco. I estimated the seas were running at about Force 11 and at some points at Force 12, which is the level of a hurricane.

One morning our table’s waiter reported that the waves had stove in the porthole of the cabin where he was bunked below. Though he was a fairly cool, macho young Italian, it was clear he was frightened. For a wave to stave an ocean-going ship’s porthole, it has to hit the ship with a mighty force. It was at that point that I realized for sure, we were in trouble. If the ship had gone down, we couldn’t possibly survive in lifeboats on seas that high, and I would have been surprised if it carried enough lifeboats to accommodate all the passengers and crew. Not that it would have mattered.

Carrying passengers across the North Atlantic in the middle of winter is insane. Intense storms are a fixture of the North Atlantic at that time of year. That Royal Caribbean’s management chose to do so demonstrated they have absolutely no concern for passengers’ safety, to say nothing of their comfort, nor for the safety of the ship’s large complement of servers, stewards, maids, cooks and other employees who are not seamen.

We finally made it to New York—obviously; otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog. I would never set foot on another Royal Caribbean ship again. And after having read the reports on the ICV site, which seem to emanate without pause, I doubt if I would book a cruise at all. Sure wouldn’t recommend it to a friend!

Image: MS Majesty of the Seas. Upstate NYer. Wikipedia Commons.

How’s the economic stress level in your parts?

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Here’s a new money tool that’s entertaining or frightening, depending on where you live, and always interesting. The Associated Press has put together an interactive map of the U.S. measuring economic stress nationwide, by county. Mouseover your home county (or anyone else’s) and you see a “stress” index based on unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy figures. The higher the stress index, the harder times are in any given place.

The thing is fascinating. As bad off as things are in Michigan, what with the struggles of the automotive industry, things generally are far worse in California. The Imperial Valley has an unemployment rate of 27.7 percent! That plus a foreclosure rate of 4.28 percent and bankruptcies at 1.14 percent add up to a stress index of 31.58, making my  home county look good, with a mellow stress index of 14.45. It’s interesting to observe the trends in various regions; the entire midsection of the country is relatively less affected by the deprecession. Possibly because fewer people live there? People in North Dakota are too busy shoveling snow to worry about the economy?

How does your part of the country measure up?

Image: Map of USA Showing State Names. Wikipedia Commons. GNU Free Documentation License.