Have you seenEvan‘s new website enterprise? He’s experimenting with moving to other kinds of sites than blogging. It’s a baby pool, and it’s a hoot. Prospective parents can set up little minisites where friends and family can guess when and where Baby will be born, Baby’s weight, or Baby’s gender.
Evan’s description of what he had to do to get it up and running is interesting. It was quite a job. No handy-dandy WordPress template is out there for this sort of thing! Despite his considerable tech skills, he ended up having to hire a designer to make it work the way he wanted—at least one wanted as much as $10,000 to do the job! Read his post to learn how he found someone to help for a fee within his budget.
I hope Evan will keep us up to date on how this idea flies. I’ve also thought it might be worth looking in to other kinds of sites that could be monetized, though I’m not clever enough to come up with something like a baby pool. La Maya has started a site to display the paintings she’s willing to sell; she hopes to add new images regularly. It’ll be interesting to know whether the baby pool gets anywhere as an enterprise.
{sigh} We have seen the future, and it is…the Dark Ages. The Party of No has wrested control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Party of the Half-Baked. No hope for relief from the metastasizing mean-mindedness and outright viciousness that have invaded our body politic is to be found, anywhere.
Here in Arizona, voters have approved a measure that exempts citizens and businesses from the national healthcare plan. The comically moronic Governor Jan Brewer (she of “uhhhhhh………..tee hee!……..uhhhhhmmmmmm”) was re-elected, of course, and the craven pol who presided as superintendent of public instruction while Arizona’s school system sank to the bottom of the national rankings is now, God help us, the state attorney general.
Now I’ll have to say, I wasn’t pleased with Obama’s healthcare plan. Without a national option, it’s just another iteration of what we already had: it threw us into the lion’s den with a pride of hungry insurance companies. We needed an option to make something like Medicare available to everyone who wished to accept it. Medicare is expensive — even after the state’s insurers raised their rates, my employee plan cost an eighth of what I’m paying to be fully covered under Medicare. However, for what I’m paying, coverage is better. If I fall ill and have to go doctors frequently, my overall costs will be much lower. Requiring everyone to sign up for full coverage with private insurers while blocking insurers from shafting people who really need care simply guaranteed that everybody’s costs would go up, coverage would be no better than what we have, and the well-heeled insurance industry would be joined by every other well-heeled industry in mounting a no-holds-barred campaign against the Obama administration.
Accepting compromise on healthcare was stupid. If the Democrats couldn’t swing a national healthcare option, then they should have dropped their plan until they could.
As for the Afghanistan mess: We were in Afghanistan long before Obama came along. Matter of fact, it seems to me we entered the war in the Middle East because a certain pack of lies emanated from a previous administration. Afghanistan was where the perp was hiding, but instead of going after him, we took it upon ourselves to depose a dictator who was formerly our ally, not because he was much of a threat but because, said our then-President, “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”
So…now we have in office some folks who think it’s acceptable to stomp on the head of a woman who disagrees with their doctrine.
Time to get out our brown shirts and iron them. And if you still believe you’re in the middle class, say good-bye to all that.
Finished another set of student papers, highly entertaining. This bunch seems to have split sharply between those who got it right on and those who stumbled into a haze of mystification. It’s a function, I’m afraid, of online teaching. If a human being isn’t there, in person, nagging and repeating the nag day in and day out, some folks have a rough time keeping up—especially when the pace is pretty fast, as it is in these eight-week courses.
If I weren’t already in “pause” mode about online pedagogy, this would put me in it. I spent the whole damn summer trying to make this course work for anyone who might sign up. Even after I made them take a quiz on the syllabus, they still apparently haven’t read it, still don’t do the assigned readings, still don’t seem to know due dates.
Another serious issue is that some of them either can’t or won’t buy the book. Their student aid gets to them long after the semester begins, and as a result, they simply don’t have the money for textbooks. Our text is pretty cheap—available today at Amazon.com for around $10 new, less than $5 used. But I still had someone write to ask if they really had to buy the book.
Why do they think I’d require a textbook if I didn’t expect them to read it? And why are they in school if they don’t want to read?
There’s something creepy about how wedded they are to the Internet. They just don’t want to turn it off. Given an assignment that requires some research, they’ll do everything in their power to find enough to suffice online. If a resource doesn’t exist in digital form, they just won’t go to it. They’ll ignore it. Sometimes they’ll ignore it because they don’t know where to find it…and it doesn’t occur to them to look in a library. Or even a bookstore. But sometimes they appear to be convinced that something equivalent or better is to be found on the Web.
It’s kinda sad. As rivers of knowledge go, the Internet is wide and shallow. If it’s true we’re watching the death of the printed word, what’s coming to replace it doesn’t quite seem to be up to the job of preserving a culture and passing it to the next generations.
Well. Despite its barren moments, at least teaching is a living. This morning I figured out that if we can permanently keep the present “modified” terms of the mortgage on the downtown house, I can cover my share by teaching two and two, especially if a miracle happens and I get a tax refund this spring. Three and two will cover it generously, and three and three would give me plenty of money to live more or less comfortably. And to put some cash in savings toward such frolics as buying a new(er) car and being prepared to replaster the pool, when the time comes.
Image:
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Creative CommonsAttribution 2.5 Generic license.
Now, this new scheme to do the 3 percent drawdown from savings so as to stock my checking account with enough cash to cover monthly expenses is not all beer and skittles.
The fly in the beer, alas, is the misbegotten mortgage on the downtown house, which under the influence of the Crash of the Bush Economy (duck! Evan’s got the Nerf Bat! :-D) has morphed from what looked like a wise move into a money-sucking black hole.
To cover my share of the mutual madness M’hijito and I got ourselves into, I’ll have to teach two sections of composition from now until the universe ends. It means that although my bills will be covered by savings and Social Security, almost everything I earn through adjunct teaching will go to pay the mortgage.
It’s annoying, but not dire: two classes don’t amount very much work. Three sections, more work than I’d like to do but not intolerable, would cover the mortgage and leave some pocket change.
Well. That assumes that we can talk the credit union into morphing our present loan modification into a permanent 40-year loan at 4 percent. If we can’t, then I’m screwed. M’hijito is planning to call the bank next week to arrange a meeting so we can negotiate the mortgage’s reset, since the modification expires in February.
This predicament would be a lot less annoying if the house were worth anything like what we paid for it. Though values in the central city dropped slower than those in the far-flung styrofoam-and-stucco suburbs, over the past year they’ve sunk into the sub-basement. We’re now about $100,000 underwater on the little house. Not counting the $35,000 we put into renovating it.
M’hijito says the house two lots down the street just sold for $140,000, and it’s larger and nicer than ours. We paid $235,000.
We’ll have to figure out what to do about that after he finishes graduate school, which will take another five years, assuming he works at it steadily. Coincidentally, about five years is as long as I figure I’ll be able to continue working, assuming my current ailment is something minor and not one of the several gawdawful things it could be.
Which reminds me…gotta get that will updated.
Meanwhile, if I live that long, for the next five years or so life will still be a little pinched—the $2,040/month budget just covers bills, with maybe $50 or $100 to spare for extra costs. But at least I won’t be wondering where even that minimal amount is going to come from. Though still won’t be any vacations, by working somewhat harder than I’d like to work in “retirement,” I can at least buy clothes and have an occasional meal out.
Whew! What a week this has been! I about swooned under the workload, was reduced to tears this morning while contemplating my $448 (!) paycheck, finally came to and decided that there’s gotta be some financial and sanity-preserving changes made around here. Today!
Awoke at 3 a.m., stumbled across the hall into the office, and plopped in front of the computer, there to resume editing the copy that wore me to a frazzle last night. By 9:00, the phone was ringing, the e-mail binging, and neither Cassie nor I had had a bite to eat. Well, I swallowed a fake Pepcid around 4, but I don’t suppose that counts as “food,” eh?
Another bouncing young psychologist has found me and has been clinging to my skirts (well, blue-jean cuffs) as she struggles her way through the grueling process of applying for a clinical internship. This is a gawdawful rite of passage that happens as they’re trying to wrap up the dissertation and engaged in research projects or assistantships. The competition for internships is so fierce and the standards so high that they live in fear of being turned down, so they churn out dozens of application packages, which are large and filled with arcane technical reports intended to show what they can do. Each package is prefaced with an elaborate cover letter, exquisitely tailored to its target institution, which is supposed to be two pages long but which requires so much information that squeezing it in to two pages is excruciating.
This project would be torment for a native speaker. But if the soon-to-be doctor’s first language is something other than English, the challenge is just horrific.
So I’ve been struggling with the client all week. Where I work 14 to 16 hours a day, she works 24. Last night we both collapsed into our respective sacks on our respective sides of the country at about the same time.
Meanwhile the li’l 101s are shoveling incomprehensible papers in this direction. Twenty narratives, penned by authors who express a certain puzzlement at the instructions, reside on the Blackboard server awaiting my attention.
Later!
This morning after reading a couple more client documents in their second or third iterations, I was forced to pay the AMEX bill. This caused me to look at my dismal finances and to be reminded of a few inconvenient truths; to wit:
• I’ve already eaten $1,173 into my Absolute Catastrophe savings, and there’s no end in sight. • The $265 pool maintenance bill did nothing to help that situation. • A paycheck of $448 does nothing to help the situation, either. • Nor does reading and rereading and re-rereading vast swaths of arcana at $4.50 per single-spaced page (don’t ask!). • Although some pay periods bring in plenty of cash to pay the bills, many do not. • The combination of eight-week and sixteen-week sections magnifies this phenomenon no end. • It drives me screaming bat-shit crazy not to know from month to month how much net pay will come in. • Three months without teaching pay in the summer and another month without pay in midwinter are more than the money left over from decent pay periods will cover. Over 12 months, I’m running at a loss. • By the time I’ve worked from three or four or five in the morning till ten or later at night, I’ve racked up about 50 cents an hour for my elaborately refined skills. • The scheme to defer drawing down 4 percent of retirement savings for a year or two—or preferably till I reach age 70—comes under the heading of “forlorn hope.” • Sitting in front of a computer moving little other than my fingers from before dawn till long after dusk is making me flicking miserable. • The stress of worrying about how I’m going to make ends meet is making me physically sick.
This stuff has gotta stop.
Yesterday at the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the gents started talking about travel and play and life, the universe, and all that. The general consensus, led by Jerry Rose—a former teacher who decided there was more to life than teaching and so went into the travel business—was that you’d better live life now, because there may not be a later. This conversation was happening after I’d put in two hours of work before leaving the house at 6:30 a.m. to head over to the confab…
Listening to them talk, I thought, I need a life!
First off: get rid of the money worries. It’s time to give up on trying to preserve and build capital. Called the esteemed financial manager and arranged a meeting. Trotted over to his office.
There I explained that I need a minimum of $1,093 a month, net. Combined with the munificent $957 a month from Social Security, this will cover my basic bills, even in the hottest, most utility-heavy summer.
No problem, said he. This can be accomplished with a 3 percent drawdown. Since my retirement investments, which he and his colleagues have put into a wide variety of instruments (some of them calculated to be inflation-protective), are earning between 5 and 7 percent just now, he notes that this should not eat into principal. He remarked that I could draw down 4 or 5 percent without causing any harm.
With a base, steady income of $2,050, anything I earn through teaching, editing, or blogging is pure gravy. It makes a $448 paycheck look good! In a month, that’s an extra $896 on top of what I need to live!
Eight hunnert and ninety-six dollars would buy a lot of clothes at J. Jill’s. It might even take me to Santa Fe for a weekend. 😉
Knowing from the git-go that there’s going to be enough cash in my checking account to pay the bills is a huge relief. And it’s mighty nice to know that I can get there without leaving myself a pauper at the age of 90, should I live that long.
Welp, money may not buy happiness, but it’s about to buy a nice chunk of stress relief. What this means is that I don’t have to teach two or three sections of composition a semester. Hell, I don’t have to teach any sections if I don’t feel like it.
Whatever I do earn teaching can go to paying the mortgage on our upside-down house, to setting aside some money toward the next car (which I’m going to have to buy one of these days), and to buying something nice for myself and M’hijito now and again. Probably I needn’t teach any more than one section to pull that off. I’m thinking what I’ll do is limit my course load to two and then just take whatever comes along. If our chair comes up with a summer session course for me, that will be nice. If he doesn’t, that’s fine, too.
So, that should help a great deal.
Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with this life I’m shaking free.
Image:
Charles Sprague Pearce, Detail from Labor mural in lunette from the Family and Education series by Charles Sprague Pearce. North Corridor, Great Hall, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Public domain.
