Coffee heat rising

Another fun day at Human Resources

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It’s probably my mistake. Most things are. Whatever, when I showed up yesterday morning at Human Resources for the required meeting for exiting retirees, I was told that the meeting wasn’t yesterday; it was Wednesday.

Now, I would swear the woman who made the appointment for me was on the phone when I had the calendar in hand, and that I said, as I always do, “Let me confirm that…” But maybe not. Maybe I wrote it down on Thursday and just imagined I entered it on Wednesday.

This created a double inconvenience: The pointless 44-mile round-trip trudge out there (where I have nothing to do other than pack up some more of my junk and haul it out to the car), and then, because they sent a packet of information through the campus mail, another pointless round trip in the next day or two to pick that up.

Swallowing my fury, I remarked to the woman at the reception desk that I had some questions that I haven’t been able to get answered. In the conversation that ensued, it developed that she was the very person who had made this pointless appointment for me—and, we may add, so far the only one who seems to have made some sense over the telephone. She was sitting at the front desk because, thanks to the layoffs, they’re so short-handed they don’t have enough staff to run the office properly. At any rate, she offered to answer said questions.

You understand: in dealing with HR what you get is a passel of information that you already know. Whatever they tell you is a) boilerplate and b) already on their website. But when you have a real question, one that isn’t answered on their website, they don’t know the answer. Consequently, they either tell you they don’t know and they don’t really know where you can find out, or they give you an answer that’s wrong.

For example, the last time I was out there (and I do mean out: HR’s offices are way to the south of the huge campus. It’s too far away to walk, and the parking lot is permit-only, so that employees have to pay to park there or take a chance on getting a whopping ticket)…the last time I was out there, I was told that the proposed December 31 canning day would get me in under the wire for the discounted COBRA.

Without the discount on COBRA, my health insurance premium will jump from $26 a month to something over $600. With it, the premium will be somewhat less than Medicare, around $185. Not really affordable, but at least attainable, more or less.

Yesterday the HR lady read the rules for the discounted COBRA closely (isn’t that a quaint idea?) and concluded that what I’d been told was wrong. My benefits actually have to have stopped before the 31st. So, she proposed, I need to ask the Dean’s office to can me significantly sooner. She suggested the 11th—arbitrarily, because some other disgruntled retiree had chosen that day at yesterday’s meeting.

I informed her that Social Security will not deliver a benefit check before the middle of February, even though it “starts” (snark!!) in January, and that they refused to “start” it in December so that I can get some money in my bank account in January, because I’m earning a salary in December that would trigger the 50 percent penalty for working while drawing SS. I pointed out that I will have a difficult enough time living for a month and a half with no income, and that there’s no way I can manage that for something like two months.

Then she decided I probably could get away with it by having them can me on the 27th, the date of the last paycheck of the month. But, she said, I’ll have to get the Dean’s office a) to do that (meaning I have to get that bureaucracy off the dime) and b) I have to get those people to state that I’m being terminated involuntarily (even though in fact what’s happening is they’ve arranged to have my contract stop then, and it’s entirely possible the government will argue that not renewing a contract is different from firing a regular worker).

Then I asked how I get my money out of the 403(b) plans to roll it into my IRA. She didn’t know. She said I had to call Fidelity and TIAA-Cref, and she did not know how to reach a human being at either outfit.

So I asked what is the minimum amount I’m required to leave in the plan in order to be regarded as “retired” over the next three years so that I can get my accrued sick leave payments, which are doled out over a three-year period. She didn’t know. She said I needed to call the state’s general accounting office.

I asked if benefits are taken out of our vacation pay, and if so, did that mean my health care insurance would be extended over the month or so of time for which GDU owes me. She said she believed that the health insurance stopped on the termination day, but she wasn’t sure. She called a payroll clerk up to the front, to discuss this question.

That woman said that the only thing that was taken out of back vacation pay was state and federal taxes, but that the federal tax bite would be 25 percent, and that your benefits stop on the day you are terminated. I asked why the tax rate was so high. She said that was just the rules. Then she said the state tax deduction would be over 30 percent, because that’s what I put on my A-4 form. (I did? Well, that explains why I keep getting such large state tax refunds). I said that would mean they would be grabbing over half my pay!

She said no, by “30 percent” she meant the state takes 30 percent of the federal tax. Then she said it was possible to elect a slightly smaller bite. I said I would like to do that. So she produced a new A-4, which is the same as a W-4 only for the state of Arizona. The lowest amount I could select was 21.1 percent.

By the time I walked out of there, steam was shooting out of my ears.

These developments—assuming they’re true—represent substantial more hassle, substantial more uncertainty, and four fewer days of pay: $960 less than I thought I would get!!!!!

The bright spot is that I’ll net a little more in vacation pay than the $3186 I expected: $3670. Not much—$486 less than the $960 I’ll lose by moving my termination day forward—but better than yet another hit on the head.

Moving on, I tried to contact the college’s business office manager, cc-ing my dean, and was told that she’s out until next Monday. So now all this complicated mess has to hang fire until then, and then hang fire still longer until she gets around to answering me. By then I will have forgotten some of the details and also will be engaged in dealing with other messes.

Today, whenever it gets to be business hours, I’ve got to track down the woman I found at GAO and find out just how little cash I’m allowed to leave in the 403(b) without losing my RASL payment.

Then, somewhere, somehow (I have no idea where or how) I’ve got to find someone who understands enough about COBRA to confirm or deconfirm whether I really have to sacrifice $960 of pay in order to keep my health insurance premiums in a range that I can even remotely afford to pay.

What I don’t understand is that, assuming the HR lady is right in thinking I have to be off the payroll before December 31 because my benefits would extend to that day, why can’t I be canned on December 30, thereby losing only $240 worth of pay? The rule says “eligible for COBRA” and the last day on which you may have been canned is the 31st.

She interprets “eligible for COBRA” as meaning not only that you were canned involuntarily but that your benefits have stopped. In her view, because my benefits would still be in force on the 31st, and because GDU will have to not pay me for the extra four days after the December 27 payday until the first payday in January 2010, those two things together will make me ineligible for the discount. I don’t think so: I think the rule says you may have been canned as late as the 31st. If she’s right that hanging onto my job until the 31st makes me ineligible for the discount but letting them can me on the 27th makes me eligible, then by that reasoning (if “reasoning” it can be called), I should still be eligible on the 30th. IMHO, I should be eligible on the 31st, but I’m willing to forego $240 (less tax, less benefits, less every other gouge GDU can think of) to keep my insurance premiums “down” to a mere $186 a month.

So far, I’ve been unable to find anyone, anywhere who can explain this rule. Most of the HR people barely know it exists at all, and they certainly don’t understand its fine points.

Jayzus Aitch Keerist on a crutch! Is it any wonder I’m grinding my teeth until they break?

Best phone solicitor story of all time

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LOL! Over at The Buck List, Buck Weber holds forth on his two favorite ways to deal with telephone solicitors. His post reminded me of the time one of my graduate school professors occupied a fair amount of class time telling us about his latest encounter with a call center employee.

At the time—this was long before the Do Not Call law, when most people could expect two to six nuisance sales calls a day, and long before caller ID—we were in the middle of a particularly obnoxious spate of harassment from people trying to sell carpets. So one day Jack picked up the phone and yea, verily, a young-sounding woman asked him if he wouldn’t just love to take advantage of today’s special on gorgeous new carpeting, “only in your neighborhood.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you called,” he exlaimed. “I was hoping to hear from you!”

“You were?”

“Yes. I’ve decided I do want to carpet the house and am very interested in your offer.”

Well, of course the young woman was beside herself with joy. After some happy small talk during which they discussed the types of carpet and the possible color scheme, she asked him how many rooms he had.

He described a typical suburban house, as most housing in Tempe is: three or four bedrooms, a living room, a family room. Lots of carpetable space.

She asked for the approximate dimensions. He gave her figures for all these rooms.

They set up a day for a salesman to come over and measure each room and show him carpet samples. He gave her an address and made an appointment.

As the conversation wound down, she thanked him profusely for his business (probably the first sale the kid had ever made). He said she was welcome, happy to talk with you, etc., and then, just as she was about to hang up, he said…

“Oh, by the way, I have one question…”

“Yes?”

“These carpets can be installed over dirt floors, can’t they?”

A moment’s pause ensued. “You have dirt floors?”

“Why, yes,” he said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

The line went dead. For some reason, he didn’t get any more calls from carpet sellers.

phonegoldplated

A$k and Re¢eive, Revisited

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If you ever need a reminder to get bids for every…single…project of any kind, here’s a tale with that a moral to it:

Richard the Landscaper proposed to remove the dying ash in front for for $1,000, down from the original $1,500 he thought the market would bear. When I asked if he would please also remove the moribund plantings around the tree’s base, cover the stump with a mound of dirt, spread some more gravel there and arrange the existing rocks decoratively, and then plant one of the baby vitex trees I’ve cultivated in pots, he added $200 to his bid. So, as I’m facing unemployment I’m looking at a total of $1,200 to take down the tree and repair the landscaping.

Welll….

I called the Desert Botanical Garden, which has a master gardener training program, and asked if they could refer any of their graduates. Forthwith came in the e-mail a list of a dozen certified arborists. So I called one—let’s call him Mike the Arborist. He just came by to view the jungle that is my yard and give me some estimates on the large amounts of pruning that need doing.

He said he would take out the dead ash tree for $500!!!!!

More ordinary tree trimming comes in the vicinity of $40 to $100, depending on the complexity and size of the job.

Covered with sharp thorns the size of tiger claws
Sharp thorns the size of tiger claws...trimmed back from the sidewalk less than a month ago!

For $225, he’ll also remove the ferocious palo brea on the south side, which has become a dangerous menace—passersby risk facial scratches and eye-gouges if they have the temerity to use the sidewalk in front of my house. For about $40 apiece, he’ll trim up the two trees the palo brea is crushing to help them fill out properly. For a few dollars more, he’ll trim the olive inside the front courtyard, restoring it to its former graceful splendor. With the job in the front yard, he’ll clean up the desert willow and restore the passageway between it and the Texas ebony free of charge.

In the back yard, he proposed some judicious trimming of the exuberant emerald paloverde—not enough to infringe on its shade-giving properties but a little pruning to keep it off the roof and discourage crossed limbs. And though he disapproved of  Satan‘s westside weeping acacia (yes—he and Proserpine actually planted two devil-pod trees in back, one where it would drop plaster-staining junk into the pool and the other where its limbs could snap off and fall on the house—or on the neighbor’s house), he recommended against removing it and suggested simply cleaning up the lower limbs, which are dying off  because they’re not getting enough light.

So, instantly the guy drove away, Richard got a call canceling the job he had yet to do. I think he’d forgotten about it, to tell the truth. Thank goodness! It looks to me like I can get ALL the pruning and tree removal—take out the dead ash and the nuisance palo brea, prune the palo verde, the olive, the vitex, the desert willow, and one of the hideous willow acacias in back, plus build the mound and move the stones onto it—for not a helluva lot more than Richard proposed for the ash and the mound (all told, R. wanted $1,200 for those jobs).

Wow! I was braced for an $800 to $1,000 bid just to do the basic trimming, to say nothing of removing the palo brea. Can you imagine?

Asked him what his background is and how he came to start a business. He said he and his wife had moved back to the US from Germany, where they’d started their family (she’s German), because they wanted more space and Arizona was where they could afford it. He started working for a large landscaping firm that was doing all the maintenance for the huge new developments out on the west and east sides. There he learned how to climb and prune trees, ended up as a manager, and started studying landscaping seriously. He became a certified arborist, and then after the economic collapse he and a partner bought an existing landscaping company that had about 35 accounts. He said their plan is to target small to medium-sized developments that are too small for the huge landscape maintenance firms to bother with. So…it sounds like he knows what he’s doing and he has some experience. He’s very clean-cut, well-spoken, and even though he’s a gringo he doesn’t look like an escaped convict.

My yard is desperately overgrown. It not only needs to have a huge, mature (dead!) ash tree removed, it needs serious work that verges on relandscaping. Some of that work really should be done by an expert. Unless I miss my guess, this single call to just one other contractor is going to save about $1,000 on the total job.

Hamburger: 12 ways to keep your family safe

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Because chuck and rump roasts often go on sale for 10 to 50 cents a pound less than the grocery store’s hamburger, I look for bargain roasts and ask the butcher to grind it for me. Not only is the resulting hamburger cheaper, I find it invariably tastes much better than preground burger. Well… did you see the Sunday Times‘s exposé about the gross ways hamburger is prepared in slaughterhouses and the unholy results on public health? Add another good reason for asking the butcher to grind a single roast: ground beef from a source you can see is safer and you know what’s in it!

I’m not going to dwell on the horrific facts reporter Michael Moss uncovered, except to point out that the single burger that poisoned a 22-year-old woman and left her in a wheelchair for life likely consisted of “products” from four different meat packers, some of which define meat in ways you and I would define “garbage.” One of them contributed “lean finely textured beef,” which consists of “trimmings” put through a centrifuge and then treated with ammonia to kill microbes. Yummie!

This explains why the custom-ground hamburger from a butcher’s counter tastes better than even the best of preground burger. It may explain, too, why neither the dog nor I have croaked over from food poisoning. Yet.

Other than abstaining from hamburger, what can you do to keep your family safe? Nothing is 100 percent, but a few habitual strategies will help:

• Buy preground meat at Costco, one of the few retailers that tests meats for bacterial contamination before marketing them.

• Buy beef roasts at a butcher shop or at a grocery store with a staffed butcher counter. Select lean cuts and ask the butcher to grind them for you.

• Never buy preshaped, prepared hamburger patties. Ever.

• Before preparing burger for cooking, place a bottle of dish detergent next to the sink, so it will be handy.

• Use a plate or a synthetic, dishwasher-proof cutting board as a surface for shaping hamburger patties. Use a dishwasher-proof bowl for mixing meat loaf or meatball ingredients. Never use the counter as a surface on which to prepare raw hamburger.

• Never, EVER leave frozen hamburger out on the counter to defrost!!!!! At normal kitchen temperatures, it takes just 45 minutes for E. coli bacteria to double in number. And since just a few cells can make a diner very sick, indeed, the longer meat is out of the freezer or fridge, the greater the likelihood of food-borne illness.

• Each time you handle raw hamburger, go to the sink and use the dish detergent to wash your hands thoroughly before touching any other surface in the kitchen. This is extremely important!

Do not touch the kitchen cabinets, dishes, glassware, silverware, doorknobs, or anything else without washing your hands first.

• After the burger is in a pan or on a grill, place the plate, bowl, or cutting board on which you prepared the meat directly into the dishwasher. If you don’t have a functioning dishwasher, fill the kitchen sink with hot water, strong dish detergent, and about a quarter cup of Clorox. Immerse all tools used in hamburger preparation in this solution and allow them to soak for 10 or 15 minutes before scrubbing, rinsing, and draining.

• Cook hamburger well done. If, like me, you can’t stomach well-done barbecued hamburger, find something better to eat.

• Never reuse the same plate that carried the meat out to the barbecue grill to bring cooked meat back inside! Put that plate directly into the washer, or scrub it well with strong detergent and hot water before reusing.

• Use detergent to thoroughly clean the countertop on which you did the meat prep. Then scrub down the faucet and sink, and also wash doorknobs and cabinet knobs that might have been touched with contaminated fingers. Don’t forget to wash the outside of the dish detergent container.

• Clorox is an effective disinfectant. If your counter will tolerate Clorox, use it. If not, use a strong solution of concentrated Windex, or make your own by mixing rubbing alcohol and water in equal proportions with an added dose of ammonia. Wipe down all countertops, sinks, faucets, doorknobs, and cabinet knobs with this product.

It’s a shame that regulation of the meat industry has grown so lax that we have to take extreme measures to protect ourselves. But of course, when you kill the beast, you take the chance that you’ll kill the consumers the beast was created to protect. That seems to be the case today. If we American carnivores want to live and we want to see our children spend their lives mobile and in good health, we need to take steps to keep our kitchens safe. Let’s bear in mind: we don’t live in Europe!

Image: American Beef Cuts. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

You want whiskey with that?

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DCP_2687

This morning I accidentally concocted a scrumptious little drinkie-poo…

When I went to whip up my favorite morning drink, I found the vanilla had run out. Ordinarily this beloved swiggle consists of orange juice blended with a handful of frozen fruit and flavored with a dash of vanilla. Lately I’ve been using Costco’s mixed fruit, which includes mangos, papaya, strawberries, and pineapple.

Hmmm… No vanilla, but in the cabinet right above the pantry, what should I have but a nice bottle of Maker’s Mark. So I dribbled a few drops into the blender container—no more than a teaspoonful—and kerBUZZZZ! Whapped it up into a nice cold fruit juice smoothie.

Holy mackerel. This is not your mother’s vanilla substitute! The effect was absolutely delicious.

I think you could adapt it to make a very fine juice-based cocktail: use a jigger of bourbon instead of a few drops.

For hevvinsake be careful, though. The stuff is so seductively tasty your guests could easily overindulge and end up face-down on the living-room floor. And obviously, it’s not for the kiddies, even with just a dribble of bourbon in it.

I think we should call this drink The English Major.

For one English Major, you need:

A glassful of orange juice (about 8 or 10 ounces)
A few pieces of cut-up fresh or frozen fruit (1/4 to 1/3 cup)
Bourbon (or possibly rum?) to taste
Blender or submersible blender

Purée the ingredients together and serve neat. Using frozen fruit gives you a very cold drink; with fresh fruit, you might want to serve it over ice.

Winter garden y-cumin’ in!

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Daytime temps are still in the nineties and hundreds here in lovely downtown Phoenix, but evenings and mornings are delightfully cool. It’s time to get ready for winter gardening, lhudly sing huzzah!

Accordingly, I spent large swaths of Friday and Saturday pulling out dead plants (quite a few fricasseed during this summer’s unrelenting heat) and then digging compost into the flowerbed by the pool. The only two survivors there are a venerable thyme plant and the rose. A blue plumbago volunteered just on the other side of the planter’s border, and since it’s a pretty plant, I’ve let it grow. It made it through the summer, singed but unbowed. To some degree, it may have protected the rose by growing into and over it. I had to cut back a fair amount of plumbago to disentangle the rose plant.

For this fall, I decided to dispense with most of the pots. The whole idea of gardening in pots has morphed into a gigantic hassle, one that had me dragging water hoses around a third of an acre every single day, allllll summer long! Enough with that! I’m going to keep one pot for some bush peas, but otherwise, no more misguided efforts to grow vegetables in pots.

The magnificent, hardy Swiss chard I grew last winter, which didn’t bolt to seed until well after the hot weather arrived, was an heirloom variety that I’d picked up on a whim at Whole Foods. It’s way up there among the most successful veggie crops I’ve every tried to grow. So, as unlikely as Whole Foods seems as a gardening supply shop, I decided to drive back up there in search of more chard seeds and this time to look more seriously at their offerings.

They had a lot of interesting seeds. Some of the most intriguing were sold out. Fortunately, I did manage to find the beloved chard and so bought a couple of packets. I found some red romaine, which looks very pretty but which may be frost-sensitive. We’ll find out, come December. They also had some radicchio, which I enjoy but usually can’t afford at the grocery store.

The peas are an heirloom variety. The packet says they need no staking and that you’re supposed to plant them two inches apart…and “do not thin.” That’s rather amazing. Because the planting bed is so tiny and the soil isn’t very good, my plan is to salvage one of the large pots from this summer’s failed experiment, put it next to the poolside bed where I can easily reach it with the hose, and use that for the peas. And probably put a few seeds in the ground, too.

There’s still so much gravel in that flowerbed that I decided to forego the root crops this year. Much as I enjoy beets (especially) and carrots, the dirt is so rocky and poor they just don’t grow very well. And they don’t seem to like growing in pots, either. Every time I try to cultivate that garden, I dig out more of the damned stones that Satan and Proserpine dumped in there, but every year more of them work their way to the surface. Leafy plants seem to do OK there, but anything that needs to grow plump underground…forget it!

Much work remains to be done. I need to find a way to prop up the Meyer lemon’s limbs, which once again are so laden with fruit they bend to the ground. Realized this could be done with lashed-together tripods made of wood scraps; this will require me to disassemble an aging trellis and saw the sticks to size. Good exercise…

Then I need to get rid of the two roses that have never thrived in their place on the north side of the backyard wall. It’s too shady there for them in the winter and too hot in the summer. A hibiscus presently occupying a pot can go there…one more pot disappeared!

Yes. The pots are going to get gone. The little westside deck is overrun with potted plants, all of which also have to be watered every single day, all summer long. What I think I’d like to do is make a single arrangement around one especially nice plant, sort of a set piece, and then get rid of all the rest of them. Same for the tangle of plants outside the back door.

That’s not all that needs to exit.

Then I’ve got to get an arborist in here. The trees in front have run amok, despite my determination not to put much water on the xeric numbers. They need to be pruned by someone who knows what he’s doing. Most of the yard guys want to turn them into basketballs, which ruins them.

The big palo brea, in its drive to take over the planet, has become a menace to navigation. Some woman showed up at my door a few weeks ago offering to trim it herself and drag the cuttings into the alley. She said her dog had pulled her into the thorny overhanging brush and scratched up her face. So I had to get Gerardo to try to cut it back, in the process of which he gouged off a big limb and left a huge open wound on the even bigger limb to which it was attached. I’m sure it’s weakened that part of the tree, leaving about a quarter of the canopy vulnerable to snapping off in next summer’s monsoon winds.

Even though it’s a beautiful tree, I may have to have it removed. In the effort to build a screen between my front window and Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, Richard (landscaper) planted way too many trees and bushes that have grown way too large. Inside the courtyard, the Swan Hill olive tree has now grown plenty big enough to suffice for a frontyard specimen tree. Without the palo brea, the huge vitex could fill out better and be just fine for the area outside the wall. It makes beautiful blue flowers, and it has no thorns with which to take out the eyes of passing dog walkers.

Richard said he would remove the dead ash tree at large expense, but so far no sign of the guy. He wants a thousand bucks to do that and relandscape the area that will be destroyed by the loss of the tree. I really can’t afford that at this juncture, but neither can I leave a dead tree snag out there. Besides looking awful, sooner or later it’s likely to break and fall onto the house. If the neighbors don’t get the city after me first.

So these projects are really going to eat into my survival fund, damn it. I don’t know what I can do myself, though. The pruning is a bigger job than I can even begin to do, and the front is hideously overgrown. I can’t afford a lawsuit from some passerby who gets poked in the face by that palo brea, nor the increase in homeowner’s insurance if the dead ash tree breaks off and trashes the house. Ugh! The joys of homeownership.

Well… If I sold the house I’d net about $250,000 (if I’m lucky…one of La Maya’s neighbors has put his house on the market for about $100 a square foot, which would depress the sale value of my house to about $186,000—or less, since she’s in a higher-priced part of the neighborhood). Investing $250,000 and taking a 4 percent drawdown would give me a munificent $833 a month to cover rent payments. And that sure wouldn’t buy much! Eight hundred bucks will buy you a hole in a rabbit warren around here, so solidly built that you can hear the upstairs neighbor widdle every time he goes to the bathroom. Amazingly, apartment buildings around here don’t even have fire walls—recently a fire started in one upscale Scottsdale rabbit hutch and gutted eight adjoining apartments.

Probably having the palo brea removed, as painful as that would be, is the better part of valor: one fewer thing to have to take care of. The vitex can run amok without doing much harm, and with just the olive, the desert willow, the Texas ebony, the two weeping acacias, and the paloverde to get pruned… Uhm… “Just”? How on earth am I ever going to afford to live in this place without a $65,000 income? Social Security just isn’t going to cut it. LOL! Literally!!

Ohh well. At least this winter the backyard will be full of oranges and lemons, and there’ll be so much chard by the pool I won’t have to buy groceries.