Time does fly, and with it our little concerns and mores. When I entered a link to one of this site’s “pages” in yesterday’s post and then had some trouble persuading the software not to link to the old WordPress.com URL, I happened to read over the contents of “The Poison Poppy.” Time adds a great deal of perspective: getting your bowels in an uproar over a $220-a-month pay cut seems pretty silly, compared to a 100 percent cut in pay!
These days I feel a lot calmer about the money situation (among other things). As a matter of fact, where next year’s financial pickle is concerned, I no longer care. If I end up living under the Seventh Avenue overpass, tant pis. I’ll be in good company.
For about three years there, I was in a constant state of uproar; during one of those years, I was in a chronic rage.
The whole flap over the destruction of my swimming pool, which took place shortly after I moved in to my present home, created a great deal of angst and downright fear, particularly after a judge would not let me, SDXB, or my lawyer leave his courtroom until after Mr. B*** was seen driving away from the parking lot. Having two barracuda lawyers urge me to sell my house and flee—and describe in exquisite detail what they imagined Mr. B*** to be capable of—was pretty bloody terrifying.
None of that hysteria died down until M’hijito proved, by installing a phalanx of infrared cameras, that the ensuing pool pump “vandalism” incidents were happening because the equipment was defective, not because Son-in-Law was hopping the fence once a month to fool with it. But overlapping that was the Great Desert University’s ballyhooed partnership with PeopleSoft, which led to five months of incorrect paychecks, missed retirement contributions, an attempt to void 200 hours of accrued vacation time and declare me ineligible for vacation, insane abuses of my staff members, wrong information (surely not outright lies?) from HR, and a $220 de facto monthly pay cut. And this was superimposed over the slowly but steadily growing issues surrounding My Bartleby, the single most unholy personnel issue I have ever had to deal with—one that dragged out over four excruciating years.
Looking back on it, I realize how close to a breakdown I must have been. It’s no wonder I ended up in the hospital with stress. What is a wonder is that I survived at all.
Well, now that only two months remain in my tenure with the Great Desert University, I no longer feel an irrational hatred for the institution (it’s like hating rainfall or the moon in the sky). True, a trip to Tempe does evince a flinch reflex, and I do look forward to never having to enter that burg again.
In spite of the year of unemployment and enforced penury coming up, I feel comfortable about the future. Money happens, after all. Some things are better than a regular salary. Some things are worse than penury.
The other day, as you may recall, I was ruminating about the wild range of prices for very similar houses in the tiny 1970s tract that is my immediate neighborhood. Asking prices just now range from $130,000 to $294,900. All the houses are similar in size, construction, and quality.
Well. The Mexican contractors who bought two houses just to the north of me and cherried them out with only the classiest of flair quietly put one of them on the market. La Maya spotted the selling price in the paper:
Three hundred and ten thousand dollah!
Holy mackerel! That’s what these houses were selling for at the height of the bubble!
They did do an exceptionally nice renovation. But still: no amount of style changes the fact that it’s just another aging three-bedroom tract house a block and a half away from the destruction that was once a light-rail project. Or that it is right next door to a run-down slummy shack that has been rented out for the past several years to an endless succession of down-at-the-heels men—often as many of six of them at a time. These guys use the front yard as a parking lot, so that one of them can use the garage to practice his drums. They have large barking dogs, and by way of making their neighbor Manny crazy occasionally shine lights directly into his yard.
I don’t know how the Contractors pulled that off, but whatever they did, it’s good for the neighborhood. As La Maya pointed out, it indicates that prices have held fairly steady here in spite of the crash.
And well they should have. Yesterday afternoon I spent an hour or so biking around the area, which surrounds a small park. It really is a beautiful neighborhood. Some of the houses are spectacular. Others are just very nice. Except for a few properties in my part of the ’hood and a few more in the tackier section just to the north, most houses are well maintained. The benefit of living in the low-rent section of a fancy neighborhood is you get to enjoy the swell ambience without having to pay upwards of a half-million dollars for the privilege.
I’m glad I didn’t panic and bolt to Sun City along with SDXB in the wake of the vandalism drama. And I hope I can hang onto my house in unemployment. This is a great place to live!
Sometimes I think it would be a great idea to convert my pool into a trout pond.
The stock pond on our old ranch was not all that much bigger than the pool. Somewhere along the line, some old ranch hand had the bright idea to pour a bunch of trout fry in there. Amazingly, they survived. When my father was living, he would go up there and catch fish, which he would bring back to the house for dinner.
Hey! It would go with the chard patch! Who needs a grocery store when you’ve got trout and chard growing in the backyard?
Seriously: d’you realize it can cost as much to get rid of a pool as it does to build one? Around here, you can get a backyard pool installed for around $15,000 to $20,000. By the time you hire a licensed contractor to demolish the concrete walls, pull up yards and yards of concrete and Kool-Deck, fill in the gigantic hole, and relandscape the yard (pulling out and rebuilding your block wall in the process), you could easily spend that much to uninstall it.
A number of homeowners have converted their pools to what they think of as “natural,” chlorine-free swimming holes. I can’t imagine you could get away with that around here: it’s against the law to let your pool go green. Arizona is developing quite a West Nile problem, one that’s been aggravated by the large number of foreclosures, which invariably end up with a puddle of scum in the backyard.
On the other hand, it’s unclear that they’d do much to you if you actually turned the thing into a fish pond. With fish in it. Assuming you could keep them alive, they’d presumably eat the mosquitoes.
The pool already has a pump and a filter (though a DE filter might not be ideal for a fish pond…especially given its tendency to regurgitate DE into the water). Some people build an above-ground device that functions as a kind of biological filter. Besides having to build that and maybe install a pump designed for a pond (would it work with a 10- or 12-foot-deep pool?), you’d need to tear up the hideous Kool-Deck and redesign the landscaping to create a garden effect around the pond. A fish pond in the middle of a pad of Kool-Decked concrete would just look stupid: like a swimming pool you converted to a DIY fish pond. Even this guy’s pond looks silly, IMHO, because he left it in the middle of a surrounding wooden deck. Better than Kool Deck, by far, but still: obviously a repurposed swimming pool.
No. You’d have to get someone to jackhammer out the concrete, haul it off, and relandscape with xeric mulch (in our yard, that would be what we call quarter-minus), trees, and smaller flagstone or brick sitting areas, bordering the “pond” with boulders, stones, and plantings. Lots of desert bunch grasses: that would look nice.
Here’s what I figure one would have to do to convert my gigantic pool into a functioning trout pond:
• Replaster with Pebble-Tec or RiverRok, at the very least, paint or resurface the white plaster with something dark • Build a filter basin • Reroute the pool’s plumbing to feed water into the filter basin • Disguise the basin with boulders to create a waterfall effect • Build some ledges or lay some boulders inside the pool to create shelter for the fish • Lay some soil on the bottom in which to grow water plants • Jackhammer and haul the concrete all around it • Regrade the ground around the pond • Edge the pond with boulders, stones, and plantings • Get rid of the endlessly aggravating palm trees • Plant a shade tree or two in the area where the concrete was removed • Build a sitting area near the tree and pond, using a compatible surface such as flagstone or brick • Lay stepping stones • Extend the watering system, which would entail… . . . Hooking up a new valve to existing system . . . Laying new pipe . . . Setting up new irrigation tubes • Plant ornamental grasses, shrubs, and small stuff • Install water plants • Spread quarter-minus • Refill pool and adjust water • Introduce fish
LOL! Wouldn’t that be a project!? And though you’d dispense with the endless application of pool chemicals and the chronically broken-down cleaning system, you’d still have a pump and filter to have to take care of. And one wonders whether the fish could survive in Phoenix city water: in some seasons it’s every bit as chlorinated as pool water! Our stock pond, after all, was fed by the Hassayampa River. You’d have to find a way to dechlorinate the water before you could refill the pond, which in the summertime is every. single. day.
Assuming you hold the koi and stock your pond with bass and trout, what do you have?
The most expensive trout dinner in the history of the world.
When I was pregnant with M’hijito, his father and I lived in beautiful high-ceilinged old house in an elegant midtown historic neighborhood. Being centrally located and full of pretty 1920s and 30s homes, the area was very hot with the young professional set…and it was a playground for the homeless mentally ill, had the highest per-capita rate of drug use in the city, and was served by an unsafe and unusable public school. With a baby on the way, we considered moving.
But we loved the house—loved it to the point of distraction—and really didn’t want to leave. So instead we decided to add on to create a little more room for the new family member and then hunker down and learn to live with the facts of life in the big city. We hired my best friend’s father-in-law, an underemployed architect, to design the addition.
Bob came out of retirement (it’s hard to be “retired” when you’ve never worked, to speak of) and created exactly what we wanted: two large rooms added to the back of the house, one a spacious nursery and bedroom for the pending baby, and one a custom-designed office for me, appointed with a vast built-in desk, matching cabinetry, ceiling-to-floor bookcases covering an entire wall. What we didn’t know—no one knew—was that during this project Bob was suffering from terminal cancer. He seemed perfectly well as he supervised our contractor and ran interference with the city inspectors. But within a few weeks after the addition was completed, Bob died.
By the time we moved into the rooms, my son was born and six months old. Because I was finishing my dissertation, M’hijito was farmed out to a wonderful, grandmotherly neighbor for several hours a day, so I could write uninterrupted. I had a big old German shepherd, Greta, the only dog I’ve ever known that truly rose to the level of greatness. Greta saved my son’s life once…but that’s another story.
So on this quiet autumn day, I was working in my office, writing, frantically writing, with Greta dozing in her usual spot near my chair.
Suddenly, Greta sat up, her ears at attention and her gaze fixed at a point in space near the door to the room. She seemed to be watching something. But nothing was there. Not that I could see, anyway.
Her eyes tracked across the room, as though she were watching someone or something enter and walk across the floor.
She rose to her feet. And I rose to my feet. She didn’t appear to be alarmed. She made no sound. She didn’t lift her hackles. Strangely, I didn’t feel alarmed, either, even though this was very odd behavior. She started to walk around, in the same way she always followed me around. She moved back and forth in the room and then walked out through the door and into the baby’s room, where she paused, walked around a bit, paused.
I knew it was Bob. He’d come back to look at the rooms. He hadn’t seen them after we moved in—he’d died soon after the project’s completion. He came back to see what the place looked like with people living in it.
So convinced was I of this conceit that I actually spoke his name aloud. Greta again moved across the room as though she were following at someone’s side. At that point I said something like “Thanks, Bob. You did a beautiful job. We love the new rooms.” A few seconds later, just as abruptly as she’d gone on the alert Greta lost interest, came back to me, and sat at my side. Whatever it was that had happened was over.
We walked back into the office. I sat down and went back to work. Greta went back to sleep.
Who knows? Maybe she was having some sort of waking doggy dream, a canine hallucination. But the sense that someone was there—and the sense that it was Bob—was inescapable.
Still: if humans can have dreams and visions of the dead, why can’t a dog? It’s easy to understand how people living in less skeptical times believed the dead could return to visit in dreams. Dreams like that can be extremely vivid.
The other night, I experienced such a dream. For me to dream at all is unusual: as you get older, you dream less and less, and in my dotage I hardly ever dream, and almost never in color. But here was this dream: not only in color but with imagery so tangible it felt three-dimensional—not at all like the usual movie reel.
In the dream, I had gone to Texas to attend a professional conference, which took place in the hotel where I was staying. I hate going to conferences. Few things bore me more intensely than sitting through endless presentations at conferences. So I was less than thrilled to be in this old-fashioned, historic-looking hotel, though it was a handsome old place, its walls painted a creamy color with deeply polished walnut trim complemented by thick, rich carpeting.
Morning having dawned on what I expected would be a tedious day, I got up, showered, dressed, and walked down the stairs that led from the upstairs rooms to go to breakfast. Already pre-bored, as it were, I dawdled on the steps, playing like a little kid with the wooden banister. When I reached the bottom, where the staircase curved out into the lobby, I looked up and there was my father.
My father, a Texan fond of saying the best thing about being from Texas is being as far from it as you can get, has been gone for so long that I can barely remember what he looked like. In a waking moment, I couldn’t conjure his face to save my life. But there he stood, clear as day, in full color and three dimensions, absolutely recognizable.
He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t give voice to the words in my mind: What are you doing here?You’re dead!
He said he was in town to see his mother, who was ill and needed someone to visit her.
My grandmother died long before I was born.
Shortly, I awoke. The image of my father’s face and the sound of his voice were as clear and sharp as if I had just seen him alive. And who knows? Maybe I did.
Have you ever had an experiencewhere you thought, seriously, that you were visited by the dead?
If you enjoy reading and you like your reading matter on paper, not in little lights on a screen, you need to know what is happening to the people who bring novels and nonfiction to you. The following post, originally published in the October 2009 issue of Southwest Signature, is by Bill Fessler, president of the Arizona Book Publishing Association. Bill is general manager of American Traveler Press. ATP has published more than 250 books, primarily focused on the tourism industry, among them souvenir cookbooks, outdoor and nature guides, and general information about local subjects. Bill enjoys traveling, and his business fits in perfectly with this love.
The latest (big) news in the book industry is that Wal-Mart has begun selling bestselling, hardcover books for $10 on their website. Amazon.com decided to match this price, and now Target seems to be joining the fray. Things are getting heated, and the prices have dropped to $9. As a consumer, this sounds awesome; but as a publisher, this is awful. And yes, this includes those of us whose books are not on the bestseller list.
If a book by Sarah Palin, Barbara Kingsolver, or another big name can be purchased for $10, how are the rest of us going to convince the customer that our $19.95 book is worth the extra money? The answer: we can’t compete at this price. If your book is $19.95, the consumer will simply pass over your book and look for a $9.95 competitor. If your book is $9.95, that means you are selling it to the bookstore for $6 or less (probably in the $3 range). Very few of us can make a profit selling books at this price point.
“If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” David Gernert, Grisham’s agent, told the New York Times. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s Ford County for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted bestsellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”
“But Bill,” you ask, “what can I do to combat this?”
First of all, don’t buy these $10 books; if you really want to read them or buy them as presents, pay a reasonable price (I suggest no less than 20% off of the retail price). Second, buy them at a physical store, not online; pricing like this is designed to direct consumers to online purchasing, which ultimately leads to closed stores. Third, strongly consider buying them at an independent bookstore; Barnes & Noble and Borders have a better chance of surviving a lengthy online war between Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, and Target, but the little guys need customers in their store every day, buying books, in order to survive.
Last, start discussing this bad decision with your friends, coworkers, and neighbors; we need to break the cycle of Zombie-consumerism (basing our purchase decisions on price more than any other factor). Just as McDonalds does not make the best hamburger, Simon & Schuster does not publish the best book. But if you look at their revenue stream, one could argue they do.
There are better books out there—we know that there are better books among our publishers right here in ABPA. But until we begin to spread the word and change the buying habits of those around us, the loser will be the consumer. Don’t be a Zombie!
The American Express bill arrived today. Hot dang! Just a little over $1,000!!
That’s within easy shooting distance of the $1,000/month post-Canning Day figure I’ve set for total discretionary spending (i.e., all costs that are not recurring monthly bills), and it’s well below my current $1,200/month budget.
And that’s without even trying very hard!
Last month’s success included a $97 bill for pool repair, a $50 trip to Home Depot, and a $25 junket to Lowe’s. Plus the $30 flu shot that GDU’s cockamamie insurance wouldn’t cover. Criminey, I even went to Whole Foods in this billing cycle!
So pretty clearly, even at the $1,000 target, there’s room for some play.
This month I’ve been consciously aiming for the $1,000 budget—last month, I had in mind $1,200 as the spending limit. So far, I’m in the black overall…but we’re only a week into the budget cycle, and I’ve spent about $60 more than planned for that first week. But catching up should be fairly easy: I’ve got all the food in the house I need, probably won’t have to buy gas for another week…uh oh.
Nooo… I take that back: the plumber’s coming over this morning. Day-umn! Bathtub drain is clogged. That’ll be a hundred bucks.
Okay…so I’m about to be about $160 over budget for the first week of this month’s budget cycle. That just means I’ll have to stay out of grocery stores next week. Not a very tall order, since the freezer is so full I can barely close the lid.
So, what’s the explanation for this little flicker of budgetary joy? A couple of things:
1. Mindset. I just made up my mind that I was going to spend less. Somehow, like making up your mind that you’re going to eat less and eat better to lose weight, that seems to set you on the right track.
2.Keeping track of every expense, to the penny. I keep an Excel spreadsheet in which I subtract expenditures from the amount budgeted for each billing cycle.
3.Strategizing shopping trips. I made three Costco runs and three trips to Safeway, each time with lists in hand. All were scheduled shopping trips, not serendipitous drop-ins on the way home from work. During the month, then, I had three shopping days, and on those days I went to Costco, Safeway, AJ’s, Trader Joe’s (once), and Whole Paycheck (once). Because I bought only what I’d planned to buy, costs at each of these emporia were kept under control.
4.Staying out of stores! Other than the grocers’ (if Costco can exactly be called a “grocery”), the only other stores I went into last month were Lowe’s and Home Depot, and the only reason I went to the Depot was that Lowe’s didn’t have everything I needed.
5. Not getting discouraged. Several times in the past few months, I’ve thought there’s no way in He** I can possibly get monthly expenditures down to $1,200. Then when I realized even that was too high, I thought I was doomed! But lo! Here we are closing in on Canning Day, and spending is getting right down to where it needs to be.
Don’t give up! You can meet your goal if you keep at it.
With my share of the Downtown House mortgage coming out of a tax-free draw from a whole life policy, if “non-regular” spending stays at $1,000, my bare-minimum costs next year will come to $27,672. They’re that high because the cost of Medicare will be many times what I’m paying now for health insurance. Though I think my projection is accurate, I may be overestimating the total Medicare cost by as much as $100 a month. If that’s true, then I might get by on $26,472. My projected net from teaching and Social Security alone will be $26,453. Not quite enough to cover costs, but it doesn’t count the $2,000 I can pull down as a dividend from the S-corporation or the $3,960 in projected net vacation pay. In 2010, total net income should outpace total costs by at least $2,600.
The year 2011 will have to take care of itself. And it probably will.
