Coffee heat rising

The Winter Garden Is In!

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Hurrah! At last I managed to break free enough time to dig some compost and manure into the soil and plant the winter garden next to the pool. Nothing much to photograph…besides, iPhoto has decided it won’t read my pictures or download from my camera, so that’s moot anyway. Right now the garden is mostly dirt, with a couple of bell peppers and a cuke that La Bethulia gave me, plus a few pots hosting an Italian parsley plant, a basil plant, a  thyme plant, and a sage plant.

Soon, though…soon we’ll have Swiss chard, bok choy, leeks, fennel, lettuce, cilantro, red onions, and enough parsley to garnish Brennan‘s dinner plates for a week.

It should be interesting: I’ve never grown bok choy or leeks, but from what I can tell they’ll do all right here in the cool weather. It may be too early to start leeks from seed here; temps will be in the low 100s for at least another week, and I expect we’ll have 90-degree weather for another three to six weeks. Oh well. If they don’t germinate now, plenty of seeds are left over…some more can go into the ground a little later in the season.

It’s been years since I grew fennel. Make that decades. But the last time the stuff was invited into my yard, it thrived, producing feathery sweet anise-flavored leaves for months. In those days—I was just a dumb kid—I had no idea it made a tasty bulb. But now I do. 😉

Haven’t tried to grow cilantro here, but from what I understand, it’s a weed. People who do grow it say to keep an eye on it, or it’ll try to take over your patch of the world. Consequently, the seeds went into a big pot, where they’ve already germinated.

I’ve given up on imagining that gardening is an especially frugal activity. Really, I think it costs more to pay for manure and compost, fertilizer, gardening tools, hoses, plants and seeds, and water than it does to just buy the food in the grocery store. KJG recently joined the Bountiful Baskets co-op. For $15, she brought home more produce than she and Mr. KJG could eat. Last time I was at her place, she shared a gigantic head of romaine lettuce that was just gorgeous, along with several other high-quality veggies.

So, given that we have here a hobby and not a pursuit of frugality, this year the garden will be heavy on herbs, which are expensive at the store and grow happily for months on end. I love cilantro, but it doesn’t keep well in the fridge. Every time I buy a bunch of it, the stuff spoils before I can use it up. Parsley lasts longer and I should buy it, but I’ve become so accustomed to stocking up at Costco, which doesn’t carry fresh herbs, that I now hardly ever buy parsley, or cilantro either.

Bok choy! Yum! I love bok choy. Hope it will grow this winter. That is something that I will eat. Ditto Swiss chard, which has occupied a fair amount of the little poolside flowerbed for the past three winters. That stuff is the Southwestern veggie, as far as I’m concerned. It grows here all winter and well into the spring. It’s resistant to frost, and it tolerates weeks of warm weather before bolting to seed. Even after it throws out seed stalks, the leaves are still edible—unlike lettuce, which gets bitter as soon as it goes to seed.

Eagerness to bolt notwithstanding, some red lettuce also will occupy a little of the garden’s real estate. Costco does sell lettuce, but in much larger packages than I can consume, and so—again, because I rarely go into grocery stores anymore—I don’t buy much of it. And I love lettuce! It’s a great convenience and joy to be able to step outside the back door and pick a few leaves for a meal.

Last winter’s red onions were somewhat mixed, in the success department. A few sets didn’t grow at all. But some did, and the result was pleasing. When M’hijito grows them, they come out juicy, sweet, and truly superior to the grocery-store version. Mine were just OK…but again, there they were, and I didn’t have to drive to a supermarket to get them.

The carrot seeds didn’t get planted—ran out of room. I may put them in a pot, but that will have to wait until next weekend.

I wish there were more space in the yard for a garden. Because of the fruit trees, most of the backyard is too shady for veggies, and besides, to break loose more gardening space, I’d have to dig up the (expensive) desert landscaping. It has occurred to me to build a raised garden in a low area where a bunch of leftover flagstones form an unused and unusable “patio,” but that would be a lot of work, a lot of expense, and it’s in an area where dragging a hose would be a pain. Knowing me, I expect that if I had to lift a finger very far, a garden in that spot just wouldn’t get watered, and so everything would die.

Better to have a small garden full of favorites and unusual newcomers than a big one that’s so much trouble it never produces much, eh?

Images:

Red Bell Pepper. Fir0002. GNU Free Documentation License. Please note that this image is not in the public domain.
Parlsey. Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler Medizinal-Pflanzen. Public domain.
Fennel in blossom. Carsten Niehaus. GNU Free Documentation License
Bok Choy. Public domain.
Red Onions. Agricultural Research Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Public dopmain.


Higher Ed in Arizona: Soon to get even BETTER!

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What can one say?

Having closed academic programs and laid off several thousand employees, shucked off almost all graduate student support, and inflicted six months’ of furloughing on faculty and  staff, the powers that be in Arizona higher education have decided it’s time to “improve” the universities.

Their idea of improvement? Privatize entire colleges. Bloat enrollments still further. Eliminate small and politically unpopular programs. Expand online course offerings by a factor of nine. Graduate still more students who can barely spell their own names.

No joke.

Noting that, at 25.3 percent, Arizona’s ratio of college graduates among adults 25 and older compares dismally with the nationwide figure of 27.5 percent, the Board of Regents proposes to tie university funding to each institution’s number of bachelor’s degree graduates. The more ignoramuses you turn out, the greater your share of state funding!

Remember, we’re already graduating seniors who don’t know what a preposition is, who think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, and who believe that World War I happened in the 19th century. Not that these minor shortcomings should affect your ability to flip burgers and stock the shelves at Walmart…

Arizona State University, with almost 70,500 students, is a hectic, overcrowded zoo. Some young Arizonans choose to attend the community colleges as long as they can specifically because they perceive such an environment is counterproductive to real learning. ASU proposes to increase its brick-and-mortar enrollment by 15,000, create a three-year “college lite” program with a limited choice of majors and lower tuition, and to add 27,000 students to its online programs.

Think of that. We’re talking about 112,000 students plus an unknown number in the college lite program, all riding the conveyer belt through a single learning factory’s assembly line.

You know, there’s a reason Arizona’s graduation rate is so low. Actually, one can readily find two reasons.

First, the poverty rate in this state is sky-high. Overall, 24.2 percent of Arizona children lack access to enough safe and nutritious food to ensure an active, healthy life. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21.2 percent of Arizonans live in poverty, compared to 14.3 percent nationwide. Poverty levels are even more extreme on the reservations: in Apache County, 29.8 percent of the population lives in “critical” poverty; in Graham County, the rate is 22.3 percent; in Navajo County, 23.7 percent. When you’re wondering where your next meal is coming from, matters like literacy and education don’t rate very high among your concerns.

And second, thanks to a long history of neglect, legislative short-sightedness, and underfunding, Arizona’s educational system ranks at the bottom in terms of quality, nationwide. Depending on how you look at it, our K-12 system is either 46th in the nation or 50th.

Now the Board of Regents proposes that our colleges and universities be funded according the number of ill-prepared kids they can push through four years of education lite: i.e., by the number of bogus bachelor’s degrees they can hand out.

They propose to privatize the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, one of the very few facets of our higher education system that has managed to achieve a decent reputation, 38th among the nation’s law schools. Its tuition is already $19,225 a year for in-state students and $32,619 a year for out-of state students, exclusive of an estimated $10,660 for room and board. This will cut off professional training in the law to even more of our impoverished citizens, as tuition will rise into the stratosphere. Phoenix already has a proprietary law school, proudly ensconced in its artificially gentrified downtown, and so the new owners will have to compete with an outfit that provides night-school and online law degrees. We’ve already seen the quality of education in proprietary schools; this strategy will bring that level of excellence to the Sandra Day O’Connor school.

Thirty thousand students will float through online programs (the university already has 3,000 people in online programs). I’ve been teaching courses online for a long time; after several years of online teaching at ASU, last summer the community college district certified me as an instructor of its online courses. Lemme tell you something: a good online course can’t hold a candle to a good face-to-face course.

Good  learning requires good mentoring. It is based in discourse. That would mean conversation, observation, discussion, understanding. These things exist only in altered form in the online environment.

An online course is to learning as Facebook is to friendship.

Online courses are correspondence courses, barely adequate to the task of reading a textbook and taking a test on it. They do not suffice for studies that require lab experiences or field research, for learning that requires people to develop the ability to reason and argue on their feet, for thoughtful give-and-take.

Certain academic disciplines are, not surprisingly given the atavistic climate, politically toxic. Ethnic studies and women’s studies rank high among these. State Superintendent of Education Tom Horne, a crass pol of the demagogic kind, wrote a legislative bill that his fellow fruitcakes passed, banning ethnic studies classes in Arizona high schools because, said he, they promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.

I just know you think I’m kidding. Who would believe such a story if they were sober?

At any rate, the result of this performance—designed to pander to the widespread bigotry in the mob mentality here—ethnic and women’s studies faculty in the universities watched their programs run right down the drain. The sociology department at ASU, which had already been all but shut down (full of socialists, you understand…you can tell by the “socio” part, and because it’s housed in the school of “liberal” arts), has no place for these idled tenure-track and tenured faculty. So…quite a few junior and even senior faculty are wondering how much longer they’ll have jobs in the New American University.

You think I’m kidding about that socialist business, don’t you?

No. Not at all. It’s our version of reality.

Words fail me.

Round-up Time

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What with most of my time absorbed by teaching, I’ve been remiss in reporting on the various goings-on in the PF blogosphere. Here are a few items of interest…

Simple Life in France and her DH, still waiting for le gouvernement to approve him to go back to teaching after his convalescence from injuries suffered in a serious road accident, have come to rest in a tiny apartment, where they may find themselves when the baby arrives. At least they now have Internet access!

Check out this interesting post at Over Forty and Loving It, who reports that honey and milk have untold benefits for your skin.

At Bargaineering, Jim asks if your recession is over. Good question!

Free Money Finance has been running a series on the ten worst mistakes an investor can make. The latest installment is here; links to earlier posts can be found at the bottom of that page.

Five-Cent Nickel just posted a very interesting article about managing money invested in an HSA. Something to think about, and be aware of.

J.D. Roth and his wife are getting ready for a nice junket to Europe. In the course of searching through his closet for clothes to pack, J.D. launches into an amazing rumination on shopping and decluttering. Picture what he says here…I do mean amazing!

If like me, you make up stories when you fill in applications for the endlessly annoying store “membership” cards—fake phone numbers you haven’t a chance of remembering if you leave the card at home, for example—Simply Forties has found the iPhone app for you! It generates and stores your cards’ bar codes, which the cashier can scan right from your phone.

Karen Datko at MSN Smart Spending reports on what the new healthcare reforms will mean for you. It really is hard to understand how the Party of No figures this legislation is bad for you and bad for America. It may not be so great for the insurance companies that pour dollars into that party’s coffers, but for the rest of us? hm.

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail decides to cancel the Sunday paper, having realized it’s an inefficient way to gather coupons and is otherwise…well, you have to know The Arizona Republic to (dis)appreciate it! 😀

Frugal Scholar, worrying about the future of higher education in Louisiana and, by extension, the future of her and Mr. FS’s jobs, takes comfort in the discovery of a source of free food.

I love this sweet story from Stew at Gather Little by Little. Money indeed isn’t everything.

Donna Freedman advises on how to save some bucks on “salvage” groceries: food whose packaging has been slightly damaged.

At The Digerati Life, Silicon Valley Blogger lauds index mutual funds and explains why.

Financial Samurai alleges that the average American net worth is “huge” at $182,000, a claim that kicks off a lively chain of comments.

Mrs. Accountability has an incredible mega-giveaway going on, to celebrate Out of Debt Again’s third anniversary. Go there now to join the fun, because time’s a-wastin’.

Over at The Millionaire Nurse, Dr. Dean offers seven tips for avoiding the use of plastics: not only ecofriendly but also frugal!

Bucksome Boomer holds forth on a subject near and dear to my heart: budget skin-care tips.

Little House in the Valley recently spotted an ugly scam that preys on people who are deep in debt.

And so, to work…

Weird Frugalities

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You have got to run over to Budgeting in the Fun Stuff’s very entertaining post, Going Too Far to Save Money! She’s found the perfect Hallowe’en frugal tip. It’s very strange and very funny. While you’re there, leave a record of your own weird frugal habit.

It reminded me of SDXB, the most accomplished cheapskate I know.

SDXB does not eat in restaurants. The de jure reason he gives is that when he was an investigative reporter he did a series on what goes on in restaurant kitchens, which caused him to lose his taste for eating out. The de facto reason, however, is that he hates, loathes, and despises having to pay for restaurant food and (worse!) having to tip the servers.

So, when he travels—which is a lot, because he loves to travel—he carries a camp stove, a Teflon frying pan, a large aluminum camp kettle, and an array of camp dishes and utensils. As soon as he arrives at a destination, the first order of business is a visit to the nearest grocery store, where he buys a canister of propane and enough food to prepare full meals.

I mean, full meals: typically pork chops, potatoes, and vegetables, with a bottle of wine to go with.

He trots these back to his motel room, where he sets up a “kitchen” on the bathroom counter—or, lacking enough room, in the bathtub or in the middle of the floor—and prepares three meals a day.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you?

When he was in the active duty Air Force Reserve, he would go TDY from one to three months a year—basically, it amounts to accepting a handsomely paid temp job. This supported his Bumhood, which he launched before he was out of his 40s. In addition to a salary and free lodging in the base’s non-com officers’ quarters, the Air Force pays workers on TDY a per-diem to cover food and transportation. The expectation is that these folks will subsist on restaurant food and take-out, and that they’ll rent a car while they’re on base.

But of course, SDXB wasn’t eating out. He was cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner in his quarters! Not only that, but he never rented a car. He’d borrow a bicycle from a friend or pick up one cheap at the base thrift store and ride that around the base. At the end of his tour of duty, he would pocket a nice chunk of change in the form of the unused per-diem. His salary and his per-diem combined helped to support him in full bumhood for the rest of the year.

I once spent an entire month with SDXB at Robins AFB. We never once ate in a restaurant or mess hall. No, I take that back: one evening his colonel took all the office staff out to eat at a nice place in Macon.

Weird…like a fox.

Gold Bugs, Burglars, and a Way to Pay off Your Credit Cards…

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This morning while we were out estate-saling, La Maya reported on a recent burglary in which the thieves made off with the neighbors’ jewelry, and only their jewelry. Other valuables, including an iPhone left sitting on a nightstand, Mac and PC laptops, and a large-screen TV were untouched. But a lifetime’s collection of jewelry was lifted, apparently for the gold.

A chat with the police revealed that gold is now selling for $1,300 an ounce. The vic, on advice from friends, paid a visit to a nearby pawn shop, claiming to be looking for a gift for a sister who desired rubies set in gold (exactly the description of a set the couple had picked up on a trip to Spain).

They were advised not to tell a pawn dealer that they were looking for stolen goods, because of course it’s wildly illegal to accept stolen property. And as we all know, no pawn dealer would ever do any such thing, eh? Word has it that if you say you’re looking for something that was taken, the pawnshop people will freeze you right out. Instead, claim you’re shopping for a purchase that resembles the stolen jewelry and hope they bring it forth.

Anyway, when she went into this nearby pawn shop, the dealer remarked that people are flocking to sell their gold. (Yeah! And presumably everyone else’s! :-))

Prices, he said, are high and unstable—just that morning the price of gold had risen $120. He pointed out that at the current prices, you could bring in an earring that’s lost its mate or an out-dated bauble and come away with a nice pocketful of cash.

Dealers weigh your jewelry and pay by the gram or by the troy ounce. Today a gram of gold was selling for $41.66. One gram equals .035 ounce.At the end of trading today, gold was selling for $41.66 a gram, or $1,295.83 an ounce. He said even a thin piece of gold of the sort that decorates an earring could be worth a couple hundred bucks.

La Maya said she’s going to dig out the orphaned earrings she’s tossed in the drawer in the forlorn hope of someday finding their lost mates, and she’s going to schlep them to the nearest pawn shop. I’ve got a couple of orphaned earrings myself, plus a pair of old 1970s hoop earrings, massively out of style (14k, as I recall) and a gold ring that no longer will slide over a knuckle.

At those prices, you could turn your discards into enough cash to pay off a credit-card balance or take yourself out to a very nice dinner or two or thee.

Think of that. Gives new meaning to “decluttering,” doesn’t it?

Images:
220kg gold brick, Chinkuashi Gold Museum, on loan from the Republic of China. Texcoco. Public domain.
Golden earring rendered using 3D software. Aldzine. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Managing a Variable Income: A bouquet of bank accounts

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Readers have suggested that one reason underlying my occasional fits of panic over money, which usually occur when something interrupts cash flow that I had planned on and depend on to pay bills, is my habit of allocating funds to various categories. Possibly, they imply, the sea would be calmer if all income poured into a single account and I just didn’t worry about whether enough was sitting there to cover taxes, insurance bills, and the inevitable little surprises. After all, I do have a decent emergency fund—$14,500, more than I gross all year from teaching. In theory, that should cushion the various little blows that strike from time to time, and it should cover the hefty annual bills one has to pay.

It is true that I have a bad habit of overmanaging my finances. The result is that I indeed do complicate things, typically by setting up piggy-banks to hold funds designated for this or that purpose. These organizational devices grow over time into weedy Gothic structures with lots of gingerbread on the facade and secret stairways inside the walls.

One facet of this underlying problem is that I’m now living on a highly variable income. From September through May, a steady flow comes in from the community college. But I never know how much that flow will be: there’s no way of knowing how many classes I’ll be teaching until they’re assigned; in September, January, and May, classes meet only a few days, and so pay from that is predictable only in its sketchiness; and I can occasionally earn little stipends by attending training workshops or preparing an online course. Social Security, we’ve seen, has its treacherous shoals. Blog income can be anything from $100 to $300 in a month. And freelance editing is very much a catch-as-catch-can endeavor.

This, for a person who harbors a pathological desire to know that each month enough cash will reside in the bank to cover the utility bills, is nervous-making.

During the time leading up to the layoff, I mapped out a strategy for “smoothing out” income so there would always be enough (I hoped) to put food on the table and run the house. Fundamentally, the idea is to build a “pool” with a reserve deep enough to protect one from unexpected expenses or periods with no income. Out of that pool, money is allocated to pay costs that recur over longer cycles than one month. In my case, these are all annual: property tax, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, Medigap insurance. I can’t easily pay such large bills out of pocket; the only way to ensure enough cash to cover them is to self-escrow a prorated monthly amount. The income “pool” also disburses a small monthly transfer to a savings account, which accrues enough over time to pay for things like clothing and the occasional surprise car repair or plumbing bill.

As I was figuring this out, I realized the six or eight credit union and bank accounts (not to mention the many investment accounts at Fidelity, TIAA-CREF, and Vanguard) had become unmanageably baroque. I was spending way too much time reconciling accounts and trying to figure out arithmetic and data entry errors. I decided to consolidate as many accounts as I could…that’s how, last December, I unearthed some $28,000 that had been accumulating over the years, like so much dust in the House of Usher.

So I closed all but three bank and credit union accounts, invested $14,000 in mutual funds, and kept $14,500 in the bank to serve as an emergency fund. Actually, since I did not believe I could possibly live on a gross of $29,900 (Social Security plus the $14,160 I would be limited to earning in 2010, by SS rules), I expected I would need that 14.5 grand to live on this year, and so that money became the deep underlayment of the “pool” account. It would sit there as money from various income streams piddle in to the “pool.”

The three surviving credit union accounts, then, comprised a checking account to hold the $14,500 emergency fund and month-to-month spending money, a savings account to hold a monthly set-aside for short-term emergencies and necessities such as clothing, and a money market account to hold the monthly self-escrow to cover annual property tax bills and insurance premiums. I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t put those funds where I can’t reach them casually, they will get spent long before the clothing costs or the annual bills roll in.

My financial advisers and I knew that three sections a semester, the teaching load I could reasonably expect, would put me$340 over the Medicare earned income limit, which would mean confiscation of an entire month’s Social Security check. We did not know how much Funny about Money would earn, and the amount of editorial earnings is utterly unpredictable. But we did know that every dollar earned blogging and freelancing would trigger a 50-cent penalty from Social Security; that amount, no matter how small, would be extracted in a peculiarly abusive way that is  not described in Social Security’s complicated guides. To avoid having freelance and blog income bring on even more punishment for exceeding the earnings limitation, my lawyer suggested an S-corporation, which would hold that money separate from my personal income. It would have to pay me a small salary—last year that came to $500, gross—but it could pay business-related expenses out of pretax dollars, and anything above the salary I drew out would be counted as dividends, not as “earned income.”

Because corporate income must be kept separate from personal income, of course I had to establish a business account for the S-corporation. So much for my bank account simplification program!

Still, even with that corporate account in the mix, I think my system for getting by on an unpredictable and variable income works pretty well and is relatively simple. The four credit union accounts are represented here by blue boxes:

All personal income goes into a checking account, which serves as the “pool” of funds to cover all expenses, self-escrows, and savings. The personal checking account also holds the large emergency fund, which, because it represents enough for me to live on (when combined with Social Security) for a year, I regard as money to cover living expenses during a serious illness or injury that would leave me unable to work at all.

At my age, it’s not a question of if such an event will happen; it’s a question of when. For that reason, I’m extremely reluctant to dip into the “major catastrophe” emergency fund for ordinary living expenses.

That is why I had a hissy fit over the misinformation recently dispensed by Social Security’s telephone CSRs and the subsequent confiscation of next month’s Social Security check. This fiasco will require me to use up to $1,275 of my catastrophic emergency fund. After last spring and summer’s clothing purchases and the Murphy’s Law spate that occurred when too little income was flowing into that account to cover the base expenses of utilities, insurance bills, and food, not enough remains in my personal diddle-it-away savings account to cover $1,275. Drawing dividends from the S-corporation, while it’s doable, would trigger some taxes I don’t want to pay and leave too little in that account to cover the business expenses I project for the next four to six months.

As you can see, living on freelance or nine-month teaching income is a very iffy arrangement.

If you have a large enough contingency fund…
If you earn more than enough to cover monthly bills, more times than not…
If no major catastrophes occur…
If few expensive minor headaches occur…
If no one shafts you…
If you can keep on getting work…
If you have the self-discipline to husband your money so it will last through lean times…
If you don’t have a nervous breakdown when too little comes in to cover your basic bills…

There may be other ways to manage these unknowns. The only one that occurs to me is to build a nice, deep “pool” that will always hold more than you really need to live on, and then to budget out of that enough to cover expenses. Heaven help you if you don’t have an emergency fund!

Anybody else got a better approach?