Coffee heat rising

Life in the big city

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A news helicopter has been parked over the next street to the south for the past 40 minutes. I hate that.

This morning was the first truly cool morning we’ve had since last spring: temps in the mid-70s as late as 6:30. Glorioski! I opened all the doors and windows to let—finally to let!—the fresh air drift through the house.

But noooooo… The minute you sit down to enjoy your home and your yard, you know you’re going to be buzzed by a cop helicopter or a Snoop in the Sky. As it develops, today’s intrusion is not the police chasing one of the neighborhood home invaders. It’s the “news” copter (I use the term “news” loosely) slurping up gore for the evening news. Some poor woman, having dropped off her child at the nearby charter school, drove her SUV out of the parking lot and hit another poor woman as she crossed the lot’s driveway on the sidewalk. The pedestrian was pushing a baby in a stroller and shepherding a four-year-old. She managed to get the older child out of the way, but the baby was crushed beneath the vehicle.

This is a horrible incident. Frankly, I could do without  pictures of it on the evening news or in any other news media. But if we must indulge, surely it couldn’t take more than ten minutes to capture an image like this.

First, I question why it’s necessary at all to display such a thing. And second, I wonder why it’s necessary to buzz a residential neighborhood with a roaring helicopter for the better part of an hour, so as to entertain the masses with yet another lurid video of yet another traffic accident.

Mercifully, the local TV stations have given up on fielding a flock of “news” helicopters. The reason was not so merciful: couple years ago two helicopters, chasing the cops who were chasing a sh*thead who had taken off in a stolen vehicle, crashed into each other over mid-town Phoenix. Four men died so that you and I could watch the spectacle of a few cops trying to chase down a loser in a stolen junker.

We were lucky we didn’t waste more lives. The two copters crashed into a park. A large VA hospital stands adjacent to the park. A couple blocks to the north, two big high schools were in session. And the park is ringed with mid-rise office buildings and commercial strips.

After that, the stations decided to use a single common helicopter to pool their Snoop in the Sky reporting, which helps substantially with the crazy-making noise level. Before then, we would have had four choppers hanging over our homes for an hour. Chances are that decision was made more for financial reasons than out of consideration for the locals’ peace or because management felt much concern for future employees’ safety. At any rate, at least one small benefit accrued after that hideous and heart-breaking accident.

What does this have to do with things monetary? I don’t know. Probably very little. Except that cop and news helicopter racket is part of life in the big city. Retiring to a small town would have the benefit that few small-town news stations can afford a helicopter, and neither can small municipalities. Life with less affluence could mean life with less noise pollution. How lovely it would be to enjoy fall’s first truly pretty morning, without having the peace shattered by gawkers on the wing!

OTC Drugs: Not necessarily harmless

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Just because a medication or nostrum is sold over the counter does not mean the Food and Drug Administration has certified it harmless. Some meds that we take routinely and think of as benign (because after all, if they weren’t, wouldn’t they be available by prescription only?) have all sorts of strange side effects.

We all know that aspirin can rot a hole in your gut if you overdo it or use it to pre-empt a hangover after a night of drinking. And most of us are probably aware that acetaminophen, taken in excess, can damage your liver. But it’s amazing what some of the other commonly available goodies will do to you, and how innocent we may be of their baleful effects.

Take, for example, ordinary cough medicine. Did you know that Robitussin with dextromethorphan can give you quite a high? Teenagers competing to win a Darwin Award swill it down in industrial quantities. This stuff can cause such entertainments as irregular heartbeat, vulnerability to heat stroke, nausea and vomiting, itchy skin…and so on to infinity. Literally…

But you don’t have to take some of these things in off-the-label doses to experience some surprising effects. When M’hijito was a wee babe, a quack pediatrician we were using prescribed Sudafed for a minor cold. This was one of the first colds he’d had, and since he was our only child, we hadn’t a clue that his inability to sleep was not part of the cold. Three days and nights went by without his sleeping more than ten minutes at a time. He would scream and scream and scream, finally doze off if one of us laid on the bed next to him, but if you wiggled so much as to scratch your nose, he’d instantly pop awake and start to shriek again. The pediatrician shrugged and said “babies cry.” By the time we stumbled into an emergency room, all he could do was lay on the mattress and writhe. The ER doctor didn’t have a clue, either.

Meanwhile, I had also developed a galloping case of insomnia, which had been hanging on for several weeks. Even before the kid started keeping us up all night and all day, I’d been sleeping three, maybe at the outside four hours a night. As I was laying there next to the half-dozing infant trying not to move a hair, it suddenly struck me that there might be a connection.

What was the only odd thing we had going in common?

Prescription decongestants.

His father had hay fever and was taking pills for it. We’d had cats for several years. Although I found new homes for them before the baby was born, they’d slept on our beds, lived on the furniture, and infested the house irremedially with cat hair and dander. What I didn’t know is that I was allergic to cat fur. I did know my nose was stuffed up all the time, just like my husband’s. So I had been taking his decongestant so I could sleep at night.

I leapt from the bed, leaving the kid shrieking again and the husband mad as a hornet, and streaked to the bookcase where we kept the PDR. And lo! Both the Sudafed and the prescription contained pseudoephedrine, which has listed among its side-effects “central nervous system stimulant.” Videlicet: pseudoephedrine causes insomnia!

Within hours after we took him off the quack doctor’s meds and me off the husband’s pills, peace was restored to the house. I slept for two days, and so did the kid. We soon found another pediatrician.

Pseudoephedrine is sold over the counter, and it appears in a number of allergy, sinus, and cold nostrums.

Recently I made a similar discovery. With my doc’s complicity, I’ve been using Benadryl as a sleeping pill. The stuff knocks me for a loop, and when I can’t sleep at night—which is most of the time—it sometimes allows me to get six straight hours of shuteye. Sometimes. So it seems.

Exhaustion will do the same thing.

The other day when I was at the fancy Costco near the upscale community college, I picked up a mess of magnificent king crab legs. Naturally, one can’t have king crab without a glass of wine, right? So walked out of the place with a nice bottle of white wine.

My habit is to pour wine as long as food remains on the plate. Since breaking into crab legs and fishing out the meat is time-consuming, I topped off a few more glasses than I thought. Cleaning up after dinner, I looked at the bottle and realized I’d consumed two-thirds of it. That explained why I was weaving around the house like a drunk: I was drunk.

Any more than a glass or two of wine will set my internal alarm clock for 3:00 a.m. sharp. An all-day choir workshop was slated for the next morning. If I woke with a hangover at three in the morning, I was gunna be a zombie through the entire event. So, along about 11:00 p.m. I dropped two Benadryls, following the instructions on the label.

And fell asleep…for about twenty minutes.

Every time I closed my eyes, I had the most horrific nightmares! At my age, you pretty much quit dreaming—or if you do, you rarely remember it. Older people have less REM sleep (and, in my experience, less sleep altogether! Caveman tribes must have used the elders to guard the campfires at night). So a nightmare is a weird occurrence. I’d doze off, be jerked out of sleep by some hideous image, toss and turn for twenty minutes, and repeat. Finally turned on the light and got up: 1:00 a.m.! I’d been dozing fitfully and miserably for all of two hours. And the rest of the night never did get another wink of sleep.

The next day at the choir workshop, I was OK (I’m always functional the day after a sleepless night: it’s the following day I’m out of it), but along about 2:00 in the afternoon I had another of the damned anxiety attacks: pounding heart that feels like it’s skipped a beat, breathlessness, dizziness. These are very scary episodes. The only reason I don’t call an ambulance when they happen is that I’ve already spent a full day in the ER, where I learned they’re (probably) not heart attacks or impending strokes. I’d had several of these in the preceding two weeks, including one that happened while I was standing in the Apple store talking with a salesman.

Since I’m not particularly stressed, this has seemed odd. We have hardly any work at GDU—so little, as a matter of fact, I rarely go out to campus. The community college courses are easy and fun. No deadline pressure. No work pressure. No personal problems. Everything I’m doing in life right now is entertaining and pleasant. My overall mood: a general feeling of well-being. Sooooo…why am I having panic attacks?

Sitting here in front of the computer between the end of choir practice and the start of the evening party, it occurred to me to google benadryl side effects. And what should come up but this:

Diphenhydramine may also cause low blood pressure, palpitations, increased heart rate, confusion, nervousness, irritability, blurred vision, double vision,…

Holy mackerel! Palpitations and a speeding heart are the hallmark signs of these “anxiety attacks” I’ve been having. And irritability? Let me tell you irritability. Between my house and choir, I was cussing at other drivers who had the temerity to get in my way on the road. Double vision? Sumbitch. Last time that happened out of the blue, the opthamologist speculated I might have Parkinson’s disease. To keep the insurance companies at bay, he entered “ocular migraine” in the record…but that’s not what he thought.

Like most doctors, he never thought to ask me what OTC meds I take regularly and then to look up the side effects. They’ll ask you, and they’ll write down the drugs you say you take: they just don’t think about what the stuff can do to you.

Double-checking the Google search evokes this:

Serious Side Effects

Some Benadryl side effects are potentially serious and should be reported immediately to your healthcare provider. Although generally rare, some of these side effects may actually be fairly common, particularly in young children or the elderly. These include, but are not limited to:

• Low blood pressure (hypotension)
• Heart palpitations
• A rapid heart rate (tachycardia)
• An irregular heartbeat
• Anemia
• Low blood platelets
• Confusion
• Blurred vision or double vision
• Loss of balance, especially if accompanied by ringing of the ears (tinnitus) or hearing loss
• Seizures
• Difficulty passing urine
• Hallucinations or delirium
• Worsening of ulcers or gastroesophageal reflux disease
• Worsening of glaucoma

Signs of an allergic reaction, such as:

• An unexplained rash
• Itching
• Hives
• Swelling of the mouth or throat
• Wheezing
• Difficulty breathing.

Itching? My face still itches, in spite of the pints of olive oil I’ve used in lieu of soap for lo! these many months. Heart palpitations? Tachycardia? Loss of balance? Tinnitus? These are part of everyday life around here. So is Benadryl…

Even though the FDA rates Benadryl as a class B drug, meaning it’s supposedly safe for unborn babies, clearly this is not an altogether benign substance. Yea verily, the University of Maryland Medical Center lists among its potential effects:

• Cardiovascular: Hypotension, palpitation, tachycardia

• Central nervous system: Sedation, sleepiness, dizziness, disturbed coordination, headache, fatigue, nervousness, paradoxical excitement, insomnia, euphoria, confusion

Lovely. So all this time I’ve been trying to beat insomnia by dropping these pills, with my doctor’s approval, I’ve probably been making it worse and evidently have created the cardiac symptoms diagnosed as “stress attacks.”

Stress attacks, my ass. My Christian Scientist forebears were right! Don’t drink, don’t consume caffeine, and never take meds.

♦ ♦ ♦

If you have unexplained or intransigent symptoms, think about what drugs you’re taking, including the over-the-counter variety. Look them up either on the Internet (avoid those whiny patient wailing walls, which are anecdotal and provide no real proof that the patients’ complaints have anything to do with the meds they’re taking), in the Physician’s Desk Reference, or in Worst Pills, Best Pills, the most accessible reference work on drugs and drug interactions you can buy.

Man with $191,300 job pronounces recession over

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Ben Bernanke says the recession is over. Isn’t that great? And only a year after the entire economy melted down. Sure am glad to hear it, aren’t you?

Not to gainsay an august presence like the chairman of Federal Reserve Board, but… I’ll believe it when I see people going back to work. An unemployment rate of something over 9 percent does not an “over” recession make. IMveryHO, that is.

I’ll believe it when the local schools stop cramming 50 kids into each grade-school classroom.

I’ll believe it when the Department of Public Safety stops talking about laying off more police officers.

I’ll believe it when the City stops laying off essential workers.

I’ll believe it when the foreclosures stop and people are no longer being thrown out of their homes.

I’ll believe it when the value of the house my son and I bought at what we then thought was the bottom of the real estate collapse returns to the “bargain” price we paid for it.

I’ll believe it when my income rises to cover the ballooning costs of taxes, insurance, and utilities.

I’ll believe it when the Dow rises above 10,000 and stays there.

Easy to say the recession is over when you have a job with a six-figure salary. Not so easy when you’re in the trenches, still living the recession.

How much financial help to give a family member?

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Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. has a great post on dealing with a family financial crisis. Responding to a reader’s question asking how to stay out of the red when you’re faced with a job loss and dwindling statements, he brings up a similar problem his brother faced and is still struggling to overcome, and then he lists several points of good, commonsense financial advice. In the series of comments on this post, readers wandered away from coping with job loss to dealing with financially stressed, often dysfunctional family  members.

There’s no question that J.D.’s debt-avoidance strategies are great advice…but what do you do when the family member refuses to listen to any such advice?

For many years, SDXB (Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend) has dispensed exactly that advice (and more) to his profligate daughter. She’s capable of earning a good living (she’s an RN), but she’s even more capable of spending mightily, and she seems unable to recognize the difference between “need” and “want.” A single mother with four children, she rents $2,500/month houses (in a market where you can get a very nice place for $1,000 to $1,200) so that every child has a separate bedroom…and of course, they couldn’t do without a pool! At one point she had five cell phones (until the provider cut her off for nonpayment). Cancel the cable? Unthinkable! The kids have to have it!! She wears expensive clothes, drives an expensive car, and had an (endlessly) expensive divorce. Three landlords have evicted her, and the repo man broke down one landlord’s garage door in his frenzy to repossess her car.

Already on the brink of financial ruin, she suffered a serious accident resulting in head injuries that made it impossible for her to work. She’s now on disability and our state’s half-baked answer to Medicaid. But she still refuses to budget, will not reconcile a bank account, declines to even try to understand anything about personal finance, and continues to try to live up to means that she no longer has.

SDXB has advised her, gone to court with her, helped her apply for welfare, helped her move, given her money he couldn’t afford to part with in retirement.

In some cases, I’m afraid, there’s a point where you have to stop. When you continue to give a person money while that person continues to indulge in irresponsible behavior, you’re not really helping the person. You may actually be making things worse, by underwriting the irresponsibility.

And while you certainly can’t be telling an adult how to behave, neither are you required to support self-destructive and irresponsible habits. No matter how much you love the person and feel responsible for the person’s well-being, you and your family member may be better off if you lay down some ground rules and stick to them.

What might those rules be? Depends on the situation, o’course. But here are a few possibilities:

• The financially strapped family member agrees to get a job, even if it’s part-time and no matter how low-paid and “beneath” his or her status it may be.
• The person develops a realistic budget that fits his or her current means.
• The person moves into affordable housing. If the person can qualify for housing assistance, she or he will apply for it.
• She or he agrees to eat at home, not in restaurants.
• If the person can qualify for food assistance, he or she will apply for it.
• The person disposes of all credit cards but one, and uses that as little as possible.
• The person gets rid of all but one car and may, if possible, dispense with cars altogether and walk, ride bicycles, or use public transportation.
• The person cancels cable or satellite TV.
• She or he restricts phone service to a land line or to a cell phone—whichever is cheaper, but not both.
• If no jobs are available in the person’s field, he or she will go back to school for vocational training in some industry that is hiring.
• She or he agrees to limit the amount of time spent living in someone else’s home.
• If the person has a drinking or substance abuse problem, that issue must be addressed within a specified period or assistance will stop.

Obviously, if a family member is disabled, sick, or mentally ill, it’s reasonable (maybe even a moral obligation) to provide much more support than you would for a person for a person with training, education, and the capacity to hold a job. My point here is that for a healthy, fully abled adult, responsible behavior should play a part in earning family members’ support.

Why is the grass never greener…?

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Am I the only person who keeps imagining the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and then, once I’m in the pasture, discovering that’s not grass—it’s Astroturf?

On the way home from Saturday’s six-hour choir workshop, what should I spot but an open-house sign (Sotheby’s: around here, that spells “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”). It pointed to a tract of new construction smack in the middle of the desirable Seventh Street to Seventh Avenue corridor known as North Central, just a few steps away from the old-money Episcopalian church I frequent. Since the outfit that tried to install a set of pricey ersatz “lofts” directly across the street from said House of God went belly-up, leaving a partially built hulk to weather away in the middle of a weed-strewn lot, I figured this developer couldn’t be much better off.

Indeed not.

The perky blonde Realtor said the four units they’d completed had been sitting there for over a year. One of the houses had a contract on it, but if it fell through, she remarked, the developer would probably be foreclosed. When the four models were built over a year ago, she said, the developer had asked upwards of $500,000 for them. The current asking prices ranged from $365,000 to $399,000.

Interesting. Though $365,000 is $100,000 more than I can afford, it’s edging toward a killer bargain for 2,200-plus square feet in a tony in-town district. Asked if the seller would come down some more or relieve the buyer of her own house, the Realtor thought not.

The models were very nice: big kitchens with top-of-the-line appliances (including gas stoves), attractive design, landscaping included. And pretty clearly, if a person were to wait long enough, a person could buy them from the bank for significantly less than 385 grand. The infill land the developer had acquired had room for 18 houses. So far he had built four and sold exactly zero new dwellings.

Even the Realtor remarked that she would be cautious about buying in a development so far from being built out. With four models up (only one of them provisionally sold), we were looking at the possibility of living in a tract full of weed-infested empty lots.

On the other hand…for the startling monthly HOA fee, the four future owners (assuming four buyers ever materialize) could afford to grass over the empty lots and turn their surroundings into a pocket park. Or, what the heck: put Astroturf down over the whole place and never have to water it. 😉

Speaking of Astroturf, after a perusal of all four formerly half-million-dollar models, here’s what became evident:

• Though the houses had common walls, the developer had the effrontery to claim they were free-standing structures with “no common walls” (so say his flyers) because they’re built with a pocket of air inside the contiguous walls.

• The HOA fee starts at an exorbitant $151 a month, and all that covers is maintenance of some low-cost desert landscaping and single short asphalt road leading into the tiny tract. No insurance, no pool, no tennis court, no community lighting, no nothing. Around here, that is very high for a tiny HOA with almost no costs.

• Every house had two stories. This meant no one would have any privacy, because everyone could see into at least two neighbors’ backyards and windows.

• The staircases were exceptionally long and steep, with only one handrail. Sprain an ankle or have your back go out (to say nothing of, say, suffering a stroke or a debilitating heart attack), and you’d be sleeping on a downstairs sofa. And of course, everyone loves dragging a vacuum cleaner up dozens of steps, cleaning each one on the way.

• The lots were so tiny that even with the houses jammed together like duplexes, each house had no front yard and a postage stamp in back. One model essentially had no back yard: its downstairs master bedroom occupied the entire back end of its lot.

• In a laudable attempt to escape the snout-house look, the developer had built the garages in back, accessible from city-maintained alleys. This meant that to haul your groceries in, you had trudge across the back yard, enter through a back door, and traipse through the family room or dining room into the kitchen. Nothing like getting your exercise, rain or 118-degree shine!

• The models’ backyards were landscaped. Whoever designed the landscaping hadn’t a single clue about plantings and trees. In two of the teensy yards, they had planted sissoo trees. In the biggest of the houses—one that had a studio over the garage, giving it around 3,000 livable square feet under roof—they had planted two sissoos! Sissoo trees get huge, quickly reaching sixty feet in height with forty-foot-wide canopies, and they have a fine proclivity for heaving sidewalks and foundations. They’re widely considered to be a nuisance tree. Because the yards were so minuscule, there was no way to place such a monster tree far enough away from the structure to avoid damage.

• The handsome kitchens looked, at first glance, to be very upscale, but on closer inspection, the cabinetry was the same Kraft-Maid stuff that the previous owner of my house had ordered up from Home Depot and installed himself! The wall cabinets didn’t extend to the ceilings (which were not unduly high), and so they didn’t hold much and their tops functioned as efficient dust-catchers. I can testify that my cabinets do not hold a set of Costco wine glasses, which are generally too tall to fit. If you adjust the shelves so you can fit a few wine glasses within reach, you end up with one shelf space that’s too shallow to hold anything taller than a cookie sheet. For the half-million bucks the developer originally hoped to get for these places, he could’ve afforded to hire a finish cabinet maker to build some custom cabinetry.

The gas stovetops were amazingly small. Mine is not large, and I can just fit a large frying pan next to a saucepan. The design of these left even less space to array four pots and pans. At most, the four burners would accommodate only two large pans at once.

The sink was nothing special. The Koehler unit I installed in my house, with its two large, deep sinks and gooseneck faucet, is far more usable.

It was, in short a faux gourmet kitchen designed for people who eat out most of the time.

• The view from the second floor revealed that most of the neighborhood consisted of aging high-density housing: old apartments dating back to the 1950s, at least one of them distinctly down at the heels. The best of the models, on the north side of the little tract, backed onto the playing field of a large public middle school. Though the traffic generated by such a school would concentrate on the other side of the building, residents of the new tract would enjoy a constant serenade of P.A. system announcements, blaring, electronic change-of-class bells, and kids hollering. The private school a half-block to the south is not served by school buses or public transportation. This means hundreds of parents parade past every morning and every afternoon, dropping off and picking up their kids.

• Each house had two air-conditioning units, except for the large model with the studio over the garage, which had three. Think of that. If one AC unit generates $220 bills during a 116-degree July, three could present you with a $660 tab!

IMHO, a two-story duplex—tucked between aging apartment complexes and a large, noisy school and amazingly dubbed a “single-family detached home” because it’s separated from its adjacent neighbor by a three-inch-wide air pocket—is a far cry from my block house on a quarter of an acre with a large pool, five citrus trees, and room to grow a sissoo if one were so inclined. They may be new and they may be on the “right” side of Seventh Avenue, but they’re not worth $100,000 to $150,000 more than my place.

Astroturf. Very overpriced Astroturf.

Repurcussions of the fall

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Talking with people about the collapse of the economy, you gain some unexpected insights and hear stories you hadn’t thought about.

DCP_2671This afternoon I dropped by a pricey optical boutique in hopes that they could adjust my glasses frames and get them right. Background: Three or four years ago, I bought a pair of stupefyingly expensive Silhouette frames, mostly because my former best friend had a pair (yah, I know…monkey see, monkey do!). Their design really is neat. The lenses are completely rimless, not even any wire or nylon line around them, and the temple and nose pieces are so light and airy you hardly notice you have a pair of glasses perched on your schnozz. They have no hinges: the temple piece is made of a sproingy substance that can be folded, sort of, but springs back to its original shape.

Because they’re expensive, not every optical dispenser carries them. And because they’re kinda exotic, opticians who don’t sell them sometimes are a little flummoxed about repairs and adjustments to the frames. When they get bent, which can happen if you sit on them (ahem!), the repair job is not something for the happy handyperson—you end up having to take them to an optician who knows how to deal with them.

The other day, for no good reason, one of the temple pieces snapped off its lens. So I schlepped them downtown, not a hideously long drive but off my beaten path and so a bit of a nuisance. The woman who’s now running the place announced that the warranty had expired (say what? thôt they had a lifetime warranty!) and it would cost $85 to repair them. Exasperated, I ponied up the money to have her ship them back to the factory to be fixed, eight-five bucks being significantly less than the price of a new pair of the cheapest, ugliest glasses in the shop.

When I went to pick them up, she had me stick them on my face, took one look at me, said “that looks fine,” and out the door I went. No adjustment. Soon as I got home and glanced at myself in the bathroom mirror, I realized one lens was higher than the other. I looked like some sort of wacked-out comedienne…not exactly the image one likes to project when standing in front of 25 hypercritical students.

Hence the visit to the high-fashion optical boutique: it’s a lot closer to my house, and they dispense this variety of overpriced glasses.

The proprietor adjusted the frame so it sits straight on my nose, remarking (in passing) that the lenses had been drilled incorrectly and the temple pieces are too short for me.

This fall, before I’m canned, I’m going to need to buy a new pair of glasses. I’d planned to buy the cheapest junk I could get, just as a back-up.

“Well,” said he, “Before you buy something you won’t want to wear in public, take a look at these: I have a whole showcase full of frames marked way down. Four of my suppliers have gone out of business, and I need to move this stock.”

Hmmmm???

Indeed, the prices were marked down from stratospheric to about mid-level expensive. And some models were very, very handsome, obviously top of the line, with high-quality construction. Much nicer than the pair of glasses I was dragging around town to get adjusted correctly.

He said that the last part of 2008 and first part of 2009 were the worst period he’d ever been through, in twenty years as an optician. Not only was there no traffic through the store, but suppliers were collapsing all around him, some of them leaving him high and dry. “The outfit that made these,” he said, indicating a drawerful of jewelry-like frames, “stiffed me for $4,000!”

Over the past three months or so, however, things have been getting better. He said that right now his business is just about back to normal. People are starting to buy again, and he feels better about the prospects for the future.

Opticians pushed to the wall by the recession. Who would’ve thunk it? With so many people half-blind, aren’t glasses a necessity? On the other hand: it’s not surprising. Even low-end glasses are pricey, and “insurance” programs to help you buy the things are right up there with dental insurance: they don’t cover much. The industry has aggravated the problem by lobbying successfully for regulation forbidding you from buying a pair of glasses unless you’ve had a $70 eye exam in the past year. Add tax, and voilà! A $300 pair of glasses morphs into a $400 gouge. At Arizona’s 8.3 percent sales tax, even a cheaper $150 pair ends up costing you $240—and has to be replaced in a couple of years. Who has that kind of money laying around the house?

I wonder how many Americans are putting off glasses, dental care, and nonemergency medical care, feeling they can’t afford it? Are you delaying vision, dental, or health care because of the recession?