Coffee heat rising

Job interview?!?

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This afternoon a phone call came in: one of the westside community colleges.

Was I the person at this number who had applied for a full-time teaching job in the English department there?

Why, yes…

Was I still interested in the job?

Absolutely!

Seconds later, she had me signed up for an interview next Tuesday afternoon.

Well. That was a surprise. It’s been three months since I sent in that application. I figured never to hear from them. By now, I imagined, they must have hired whomever they had in mind when they started the search. Because the community college district’s application form requires you to enter the dates of your degrees and the inclusive dates of all your jobs, there’s no way you can hide your age from a search committee. They don’t have to see me to know I’m too old to restart a teaching career.

It’s so radically unlikely they’ll hire me that for a moment I was given pause: why jump through the interview hoops when what’s on the other side of the hoop is a brick wall? On the other hand: why not? Nothing ventured, nothing et-ceteraed.

Truth is, I’ve pretty much adjusted myself, mentally, to the idea of not working full-time. I wonder if I really want a full-time job.

On reflection, though: cobbling together a living with adjunct teaching, Social Security, blogging, and sporadic editing adds up to more than full-time work at very low pay. Just now I’m hardly doing any work for the Great Desert University but I’m putting in 12- to 15-hour days, every day: seven days a week. There’s not even time to clean the house. The only breaks I’m getting from the work are choir practice on Wednesday evening and senior choir performances on Sunday morning.

Today I made a conscious decision to loaf. I should’ve been reading student papers but just couldn’t face it. A day of idling meant…

• writing two blog posts
• contending with the daily onslaught of e-mail messages (about 70 on a slow day);
• downloading and unzipping two files from our India client, after Tina’s system wouldn’t break into them;
• inspecting and assessing them, then sending them along to her;
• cruising news sites and PF blogs in search of some inspiration for the next post;
• finishing a proposal for an online course at PVCC;
• chatting with a client editor over the phone;
• reading the rest of a detective novel’s page proofs, about 100 pages…

Oh, and repairing the toilet, after having made a run on the hardware store for parts.

It’s safe to estimate that a nine-month salary at one of Maricopa County’s colleges would start at about what I earn on a twelve-month contract at GDU. The amount I earn today, over twelve months, was about the average pay for community college faculty eight or ten years ago. On a nine-month basis.

A full-time teaching job in the community colleges would entail actual work, something I’ve learned to evade delegate in my present position. However, 15 hours a day of nonstop labor on various freelance and contract enterprises strikes me as something akin to work. And the pay works out to something less than minimum wage.

If I have to work that hard, I might as well be earning a decent living and, while we’re at it, getting a few benefits. Maybe I could afford to hire a plumber to fix the toilet.

Six steps to a frugal little Christmas

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Ah, yes. Costco has had its Christmas merchandise out since Labor Day, a sure sign that a white-plastic Christmas is y-cumin’ in. Some of us suffer from chronic skepticism about the annual merchandising frenzy. But you don’t have to be totally cheap to come up with a pretty Christmas celebration that won’t leave you feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge.

Here are a few strategies that have saved me some bucks:

1. Stop sending out Christmas cards. Just because someone sent you a card last Christmas doesn’t really mean you have to reciprocate. Add the cost of postage to the price of the cards themselves and this custom gets to be an expensive proposition. Send cards or Christmas letters only to your closest friends and family, and, whenever possible, hand-deliver them.

2. But when people send you cards, put them in an envelope and save them with your Christmas wrappings. Next year, take a pair of scissors, cut out the cute images, and use them to make gift tags. Simply take a piece of good-quality paper, cut it into a rectangle as wide and twice as long as needed to accommodate a cut-out Christmas card image, glue the image to one half of it, and fold the other half under. Voilà! A free and very pretty tag.

3. Make your own Christmas wrapping. Get some brown wrapping paper or white butcher’s paper and a set of stamps. (Or, if you’re really frugal, save and cut open paper shopping bags to lay them out flat.) Each time a gift is wrapped, stamp it with cute little designs, and then tie it up with pretty ribbon or colored rope. A variant on this, if you have children, is to roll out the paper and have the kids paint Christmas motifs on it. When the artwork is dry, roll it back up and you have bright, colorful, and meaningful wrapping paper.

4. Get a living Christmas tree. Planted in a good pot, a small pine will live several years—once I had one last four years. Cart it inside for the holidays, decorate it, and then take it back out when the celebrations are over. Water it well before bringing it in the house and again when you return it to its backyard habitat. If you have a place for a big tree in your yard, you can plant it in the ground after it outgrows its pot.

5. Shop in artist’s consignment stores for unique and interesting crafted gifts. Last year, I found an incredible pair of handblown, solid glass mugs for M’hijito, heavy manly things with swirls of royal purple running through them. The store had so many hand-crafted possibilities it was hard to make a decision, and most of them were reasonably priced.

6. Shop for Christmas gifts all year round…especially in the post-Christmas and midsummer sales. This lets you buy things you know are wanted without paying top dollar, and it frees you from the crazy-making Christmas rush. By spreading the cost over the entire year, it allows you to buy plenty of presents, but pay for them without running up a tab on the credit card.

While it’s true that Christmas is a part of the universally human gift economy tradition, by emphasizing fellowship more and piling junk on everyone around us less, we can keep the costs within reason and have memorable holidays every year.

Ads: Credit report monitoring scam

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A reader e-mailed to say he had come across an ad on Funny for one of those outfits that proposes to provide free credit reports from all three reporting agencies, but which hooks you in to a subscription whereby you end up paying a monthly fee for “credit rating monitoring.” Please be careful. Do not order “free” credit reports from any such lash-up: it’s a scam. While you do get the free credit reports—which you can get for yourself online very easily—paying someone to monitor your credit reports is unnecessary.

Here’s why: By law, each of the three credit reporting agencies, Experian, Equifax and Transunion, is required to give you a free credit report once a year. Because there are three agencies, you can monitor your own status, for free, simply by asking for a report from one of them every four months. If you then  review your bills and checking account statements each month, you will protect yourself just fine against identity theft. For free.

To get free credit reports without anyone trying to lure you into an expensive scam, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. This site was commissioned by the three credit reporting companies to provide the three annual credit reports mandated by law. You can request your report online, by phone, or by snail-mail.

You don’t have to ask for all three at once. So, if you order one in January, one in April, and one in August, you can cause the system to monitor your credit rating, allowing you to check for anything strange on a regular basis. It’s easy to put reminders in Outlook, iCal, or even Quicken to tell yourself when to call up a new report and which agency to ask.

Apparently different ads come up on different computers. I haven’t seen any such advertisement on my Mac; otherwise I’d get AdSense to block it.

Tempus fidgets

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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.

Wow! Real estate update…

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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!

The highest and best use of a swimming pool

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Trout pond.

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.

😀