So this afternoon I drove up to Home Depot to pick up the gas grill, which that worthy big-box store had assembled for free.
M’hijito allowed himself to be put up to helping me wrestle it out of the van and set it up in the backyard, in exchange for a share of the first dinner cooked on it. Yesterday I’d picked up some steaks at Costco, but today I wanted to acquire a few salad items and also some frozen veggies, to fit into the new scheme to eat better and live better.
My fevered little brain thought I could go up to the HD at Cave Creek and Cactus and then double back down to the Safeway at 7th Street and Glendale, it being far too hot to leave food in the car for the indefinite period required to stand at the service desk and then wait for someone to come forward with the grill. (You can tell I’ve done business with HD before, eh?)
But then I realize, nooooo. I bought the darn thing at the HD at Thunderbird and the I-17. Damn.
Drive across Thunderbird to the I-17, an extra two-mile drive. No problem (quite) getting the grill. But this left me a long, long, long way from a decent grocery store. Or, as far as I could tell, from any grocery store. Truly I didn’t want to drive all the way back down to the Safeway at 7th Street and Glendale, seven miles out of my way, as the crow doesn’t fly.
Cruising back toward 7th Street from the HD on the I-17, I decided to drop into the AJ’s at 7th Street and Thunderbird. How overpriced could they be, anyway? This was directly on my way and would obviate having to drive an extra 5.8 miles to the south. A dollar or two to avoid having to fight my way through more of the homicidal traffic…so worth it!
Once inside the store, though, I could not believe the prices of the most ordinary vegetables: $3.69 for a small package of plain peas or corn. Holy mackerel! I could grow the stuff myself for less than that!
Moving on…and on, and on, and on. At the Safeway, the same veggies—and even some so-called “organic” varieties of the same—were selling for $1.59 a package!
LOL! I was glad I’d made the extra drive. At a savings of $1.86 a package, the three bags of frozen veggetables cost something over $6 at AJ’s than at Safeway. Almost a dollar a mile! That’s how much the extra trip out of my way saved me today.
🙂
Sometimes it’s worth it to go the extra mile (or seven) to save a few pennies.
It’s true, sometimes—these days, often—the inner character of my state’s leaders shows forth in their faces, and too many of my fellow citizens reflect that inner character like dark mirrors, still…before humans came here this was a beautiful place, and despite the worst that the European variant of humanity has managed to inflict, it still is beautiful.
Last night Cassie the Corgi and I went for a stroll in the early evening, as the monsoon storms struggled to overcome the heat island effect of our fair city, whose beauty rivals that of the state’s governor. All around us mountains of clouds reached toward the stratosphere, the setting sun lighting them like absurd neon paintings. Truly. If you tried to paint it, no one would believe you. Here’s what we saw, only much, much bigger and much more spectacular.
Be afraid, my friends. Be very afraid. If you have no fear, click on the image above for a larger, clearer picture of what’s slouching toward Bethlehem.
That thing came in a report from my money managers today. It tracks the value of a dollar invested in my portfolio from June 30, 2000 forward.
Now, if you take a ruler and lay it horizontally across the page so that it passes through the start point on the left-hand side of the page and stays parallel to the x-axis, you will see something alarming. In all that long, eventful decade, only a tiny little nubbin pokes up above the top of your ruler.
That’s right. A dollar invested in my vast holdings was worth a dollar or more for two out of ten years, between third-quarter 2005 and third-quarter 2007. For the other eight years, it was worth less than a dollar. Sometimes significantly less. In third-quarter 2001 it was worth about 68 cents. At the end of June 2010, when this report was generated, that year-2000 dollar was worth about 85 cents.
Suspicions confirmed. Some time ago, it occurred to me that the amount in my investment account was about the same as the amount I recalled coming away with from the divorce, some 20 years ago. Statements from those days have been packed away, and offhand I couldn’t say where they are. They may even have been discarded. But the figure that sticks in my mind is…well, just about the figure on the bottom line of the statement that comes in the mail once a month.
Still think long-term investment in the stock market is the way to grow your savings? Read on…
On the phone with the investment guru:
“Is there a reason to believe keeping money I will need to live on for the rest of my life (which we may sincerely hope will be short) in the stock market is a good thing to do? Unless these funds grow or at least quit losing money, there won’t be enough for me to live on. I can’t keep on forever putting in 16-hour days, 7 days a week to scrabble together $15,000 a year, which is what happens when you’re ‘self-employed.’
“Should we be considering some other investment strategy? Maybe we should take a chunk of dough and pay off that damn mortgage on the downtown house, so I don’t have to worry about where 10 grand a year is going to come from to pay for it. If M’hijito pays rent to me, then about $600+ a month would come from him to me, instead of me having to fork over $800 a month. After the kid moves on, I could probably rent that place for $1,000 a month. Or sell my house and move into it, banking $235,000 in the exchange.”
Well, of course, the very idea is anathema to an investment manager. Put your money in real estate, and he doesn’t have anything left to manage!
The conversation that ensued was eye-opening. The firm has moved large amounts of funds into income-producing instruments, which my guy says are returning 7 percent just now. So even though the apparent value of the securities appears to drop, they’re still bringing in cash.
Couldn’t prove that by me, but then you can’t prove much by me.
He then said that the consensus among his partners is that the future of investing is off-shore; that effectively the U.S. economy is done, and smart money is going to emerging economies. He believes China’s economy will surpass America’s within ten years. The jobs we have lost in construction and manufacturing—where the bulk of job losses have been—will never come back. Jobs in the service sector, which is where most of the remaining employment resides, are poorly paid and will never be anything but poorly paid.
If you thought the middle class in this country is disappearing, you thought right. A young person, he suggested, would do well to look for employment overseas. Americans are in demand in Hong Kong, he said, although given Americans’ reluctance to learn languages other than English, Canada or Australia is probably a better bet. He would, he added, seriously consider moving to Canada if he were younger (and hadn’t yet started his family and career) or older.
Not scared enough? Well, put on your 3-D glasses and look up your address on Zillow. For jacking up your adrenalin level, that beats any chainsaw movie.
My house, whose value held steady through the bubble-burst at $235,000, has suddenly dropped to around $200,000. The downtown house house is between $50,000 and $60,000 underwater. Real estate values have not stabilized; they continue to drop steadily. When I mentioned this to Investment Dude, he said yeah, his place also had fallen in value even more than it already had, which was plenty; he and his wife managed to get a refinance, but only because no appraisal was required—the lender accepted a recent valuation. If they’d had to have the house appraised, they could never have gotten a new loan.
So…how has your investment dollar been doing? Dollar, heck… Can you spare a dime?
Do you believe there’s such a thing as an addiction to the Web? Personally, it’s the kind of nonsense I discount as pop-psych woo-woo. These folks, for example, claim Internet addiction is “a growing epidemic,” pretty alarming considering the whole concept stems from a satire. Dubious as the idea seems, sometimes I wonder. There’s no question I’m spending way too much time blogging and way too little time living real life.
It can’t all be blamed on blogging. About 99 percent of my work is done online, whether it’s editing or teaching. Last night I worked until 12:30 a.m. trying to finish the course prep for the English 101 class that starts next month. Got to bed around 1:00 and then, naturally, awoke at 5:30.
I’m getting fat because I’m not getting enough exercise, and I’m not getting enough exercise because I’m parked in front of the computer from dawn until the middle of the night. Day after day after day. To some extent that’s abetted by the heat: it’s just too darned hot to go out trotting around the park or the desert. But the truth is, this was going on a long time before summer arrived.
Normally I stumble into the office and start blogging the minute I roll out of the sack. This means starting some time between 3:30 and 5:30 a.m. Write from one to three hours. Then get up, feed the dog, feed myself, in summertime water the outdoor potted plants. Then it’s right straight back to the computer for editing, teaching tasks, Internet cruising, or more blogging. Stuck there till around 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. Get up, grab a snack, sit back down in front of the computer. Come 8:00 or so, realize the dog hasn’t eaten. Feed the dog. Maybe grab another snack; rarely fix a real dinner. Back to the computer until I can’t hold my eyes open, a state that usually occurs around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. Sometimes when I get up I’m so stiff from having sat in one position for so long, I can barely walk.
Socializing with my friend KJG for a day and a half, I learned that she spends most of her at-home time on her feet. Her house is spotless and her acre of land is immaculate because she’s busy attending to it. My house—the parts you can see around the clutter—is awash in dust and dog-hair dunes because I’m too preoccupied with the computer to clean, and my yard is overgrown and tired-looking because I never bother to trim the plants and my idea of weeding is dribbling a few drops of Round-up here and there.
This. has. gotta. stop.
As I reflected a while back, too much of my supposedly entrepreneurial time is being spent on highly unprofitable endeavors. The teaching makes the most consistent return on time invested, but it’s not returning much. Blogging? Today I made $3 and change; that works out to about a dollar an hour. Editing pays $30 to $60 an hour, but only when there’s some work coming in, which just now is not the case because I’ve been too busy sitting in front of the computer to market myself.
This morning I decided to get up and do something instead of padding into the office. Even though the four-hour nap (these cannot be called “a night’s sleep”) left me struggling to keep my eyes open, I started in on the neglected yardwork. Repotted the long-suffering hibiscus and lashed it to a standpipe so it won’t blow over in the next monsoon wind. Dragged a bunch of pots whose plants have fried in the heat back to the yard-gear storage. Dragged the hose to various plants. Stuck a number of succulent cuttings into the pockets of the murderous giant strawberry pot, probably to be pulled out soon by The Yanker, a curved-bill thrasher with a fetish for small, juicy plants. Washed down the deck, after a fashion.
Then it was back to work on the 101 class, whose “couple” of remaining small tasks expanded to fill all available space. Midafternoon, I fell asleep on the sofa and stayed out till 5:30. Back to the computer; remembered to feed the dog around 8:30. Finally finished—finished!—the course prep and got the entire, endlessly time-consuming BlackBoard lash-up ready to go.
So it is that I write this at 11:19 p.m.
It’s time to consider whether this blog should continue at all, and if so, in what form. Next semester is going to be hectic. Each of my classes is just eight weeks long, and so students will be turning in stuff in every class meeting. Even if I succeed in controlling the time spent reading student papers—which you can be sure I will not—the schedule does not lend itself to spending two, three, or more hours a day writing and cruising the Web.
One option is to demonetize the site, so it no longer feels like a job, and so it doesn’t really matter much whether something gets posted every day.
Another is to change my work habits so as to spend evenings sitting in a more comfortable chair in front of the TV and writing on a laptop, instead of in a bone-crushing desk chair in front of a desktop. This is how Funny started: it was an idle hobby to cut the boredom of the awful, violent and mind-numbing fodder that is prime-time television. After shifting the blog-writing time to early morning, I stopped watching television altogether (because I’m now working into the night, every evening).
And a third is to stop blogging altogether.
I’d be sorry to do that. Funny about Money has become part of my life (obviously) and part of my identity. But I’ve got to get up from in front of the computer. If I can’t find a way to do that in the very near future, some major changes will have to take place.
What do you do to keep this occupation, such as it is, from becoming a preoccupation?
Frugal Scholar has announced a new start-up:College Cooking Crash Course. It’s a collaborative project with her young adult kids, to build a cookbook for dorm dwellers. Recently they’ve been exploring the multifarious uses of the rice cooker, a device that appears to be about to take its place as the queen of the dorm kitchen. Check it out!
Last April my friend KJG’s almost-new RAV-4 was totaled when a speeding chucklehead ran the signal at an intersection as she turned left. Fortunately she was not gravely injured, although she spent a couple of nights in the hospital.
The police found witnesses who said the other driver had run the red light, and KJG was exonerated of any fault in the wreck. Her insurer proceeded to go after the perp.
So she was surprised to receive a subpoena for a court hearing in Peoria municipal court. The perp, it appeared, was contesting the ticket!
Because she was a bit unnerved by this, I volunteered to go with her to provide moral support. Meanwhile, she reported the development to her claims adjuster at USAA, who, upon looking into the matter, discovered that the guy who got the ticket for running the red was appealing on the grounds that he was not the driver, but that his brother had been behind the wheel. KJG already knew that the car’s owner had not reported the accident to his insurer, but this new twist was as surprise.
It turned out to be a pretty entertaining afternoon.
A witness to the accident was also subpoenaed, and the cop who wrote the report, a razor-sharp woman who reminded me vividly of Deputy Jo Lupo on Eureka, showed up. She was startled to learn, in the course of KJG’s testimony, that the witness got the story wrong and had her driving in a different direction from where she was coming from, but fortunately that proved to be neither here nor there.
The defendant alleged that his brother was driving the car, which belonged to his father, and that he—defendant—had not seen a police report and didn’t even know where the accident had occurred. When KJG and the witness said that despite a strong family resemblance they didn’t think he was the driver, the judge gleefully dismissed the charges against him.
Deputy Lupo The officer, with evident relish, announced she was going after the real perp, this time for the felonies of misleading an officer of the law and stealing his identity.
So a good time was had by all (except, presumably, for the brother, believed to be on the lam). KJG was not challenged on the issue of her innocence in the accident. The alleged driver was proven not to be the driver at all. The judge was grinning like a Cheshire cat at the details of this little drama. And Deputy Lupo got a new perp to chase.
