Just when you think you can loaf (make that “get caught up with all the survival chores you haven’t done”), in rolls another gigantic wave of work. The semester’s end brings three huge piles of student papers. Two of the piles comprise about twenty 2,500-word papers apiece! Those gems, 100,000 words of them, arrive on Monday; grades have to be in on Friday, May 14.
The 101s turned their pile in yesterday—portfolios plus a retrospective essay. Pedagogically correct but just another pointless mound of papers for me.
Meanwhile, one of my clients has been given a deadline of May 15 to submit his huge, arcane project. He wants me to read the entire darned thing. Now. And while I’m at it, format his tables to fit APA style. So, these student papers are going to have to be shoveled off my desk as fast as they come in.
So focused was I last night on finishing the 101 papers before bed-time that I worked without lifting my head until 9:30. About that time I looked at the clock and realized I’d missed choir practice!
Egregious. Especially since it’s my birthday and the choir probably bought a cake to celebrate. Damn it.
Today I’ve got to read the client’s copy. Since I haven’t had a chance to do the laundry in two weeks, the washing will have to be shoved in around that job. Given the time crunch, once again I’ll be working for six- to eight-hour stretches without looking up, stopping long enough to grab a meal, and then going back for another six to eight hours. God only knows how long it will take to read this copy: it’s arcane, complex, and turgid. Not as annoying as freshman copy, but extremely difficult.
I suppose it’s a time management thing. I need to figure out ways to balance this workload so it doesn’t all come pouring in at once.
Of course, I had no way of anticipating that the client would show up on my doorstep with a massive project just as the students disgorged a river of trash for me to read. Well…yes, I did: Murphy’s Law!
Time management lessons learned:
• Always assume that when your workload is greatest, a mass of extra work will land on your head.
• Whenever possible, arrange to do the largest part of a project’s labor near the beginning of the project. Thus when the mass of extra work comes crashing in, you’ll have some space before the project’s deadline.
• Never procrastinate.
• Delegate whenever possible.
Next time I teach 102, I think I’m going to assign the huge research paper at mid-term. It will interfere with the students’ mid-term exams, but tant pis. When it’s due at the end of the semester, it interferes with their finals. If the big research paper is out of the way, then the last set of papers will be relatively easy to dispense with.
And with the 101s, I think we’ll make all their four papers research-based. Delaying until they arrive at the two researched papers that the school’s policy requires means they don’t have enough time to ingest MLA style. About 80 percent of these folks are in community college because they’re not great students. Unless you have a passion for research and writing, which none of them do, you have a really tough time learning the basic principles of citation and documentation. Giving them an entire semester to learn what a style manual is and how to follow it should reduce some of the grading pain at the end of the term. I’m also going to have them buy the MLA manual. I can’t dispense with the textbook, which is largely a waste (it’s wanting in several ways), but I can add something they really will use.
Yeah, I know: “beer substitute” is a kind of oxymoron—brings to mind those watery “lite” brews and the horrid, pointless alcohol-free concoctions. Hear me out, though.
The other afternoon a great craving a cold, refreshing, and not sweet drink came over me. Normally I’d respond to that with a beer laid on ice for twenty or thirty minutes. But no. The new ur-Atkins diet prohibits booze of all kinds.
The fridge, however, happened to be harboring three of those long seedless cucumbers. {click!}Why not make a cucumber fresca?
Hey. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 😉
So I peeled about half of a cuke, cut it up, tossed it in the blender. Added the juice of half a large Meyer lemon (because that’s what grows in the backyard) and a dash of cold water. Dosed it with a little salt and a generous sprinkle of fresh-ground pepper. Then puréed it into submission!
This created a nice, smooth purée. Poured about a half-glass of this over some ice, filled the glass to the top with more cold water, stirred gently, and garnished with a spring of mint.
AWESOME! This stuff is an admirable substitute for the beloved afternoon beer! But instead of loading in empty carbs and calories, it’s actually good for you. It would stand up to the rigors of a full-out Atkins regimen. It tastes wonderful, doesn’t leave you feeling bloated. Perfect for a hot day!
Over atA Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche notes that Fabulous Financials‘ Single Ma is ramping up her dieting and exercise program in honor of National Fitness Month. In addition to all her other health and wealth strategies (she’s already lost 32 pounds!), she’s signing up for the Susan G. Komen 5K Race for the Cure, her first marathon. Revanche announces that she will “pace” Single Ma, but in dollars rather than kilometers: she’s set herself a challenge to save $5,000 between May 2 and June 5.
Holy mackerel, what ambitious women!
Well, not in honor of much but because I see I now officially look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I’m willing to join the challenge, but in a much lower-key way.
About a week or ten days ago I decided I need to lose about ten to fifteen pounds. And more to the point, I need to get enough exercise to tone up the belly, which is beginning to look pretty paunchy. A little earlier than this, I’d decided to get off all forms of caffeine, since the episodes of heart palpitations and light-headedness had come back in a busy swarm. The taste for high-test coffee does get out of control every now and again. 😉
Since I was kicking caffeine (it worked, BTW: the anxiety attack-like episodes immediately disappeared), I considered going back on the Atkins Diet, which worked effectively five years ago, when I lost 20 pounds or so in under three months. The weight stayed off for about a year, until I started drinking beer and wine again and, about the same time, succumbed to my lifelong love for pasta. As soon as the job pressures drove me back to indulging my favorite sins, I quickly bloated right back up to where I was before. {sigh}
This time I’d like to drop a more reasonable 10 pounds, which would take me down to a weight I consider more normal for a woman my age, who after all will never be her sylph-like self again. On reflection, Atkins is pretty extreme—reviewing the chapters on gearing up reminded me that I really don’t want to be gulping vitamins or, for that matter, weighing the amount of lettuce I eat every day.
So instead I decided to revert to a kind of ur-Atkins that my father used to invoke, way back in the 1950s and 60s, when he wanted to lose a few pounds: cut out all the alcohol, avoid sugar, and never touch any bread, rice, potatoes, or pasta.
This experiment started on the 24th; ten days later I’ve already lost three or four pounds (depending on the time of day). This weekend I wore a black J. Jill skirt purchased in the recent spending spree. In the store it fit just all right, but it tended to ride up on the paunch, climbing toward the rib cage. Saturday evening it actually fit around my waist properly—and stayed there! It looks a lot better.
Three of the new dresses have empire lines or fall unshaped from the shoulder. While they look a lot better than anything else I tried on, it’s pretty easy to guess I bought them to cover the bulk, not because I so love outfits that drop loosely from the bra line. Those will look a great deal better when they’re less generously filled out.
So. My challenge is to lose 10 pounds by the end of May, and also to firm up the flab.
SDXB escapes from the hospitaltoday! They’re tossing him out sometime during the day. Sister-in-Sin is headed back to her normal life—BiS has already slipped out of town. And thank goodness, New Girlfriend has agreed to stay with him for the next month or so.
Yesterday he sounded pretty chipper over the phone. They’d let him walk around outside, which much revived his spirits.
He’s not supposed to be left alone at all for several days. But there’s some hope he’ll recover fairly quickly, all things considered. The Mayo Clinic website says many bypass survivors are driving after about three weeks and frolicking in the sack three to four weeks after the surgery. Apparently it takes about 12 weeks for the bones in your chest to reknit, about three months (uhm…four times three: isn’t that the same as 12 weeks?) for the person to start to regain normal energy levels.
The scary thing about this is that SDXB already does all the things the Mayo describes as “cardiac rehabilitation” strategies. It would be impossible for him to make the lifestyle changes this site recommends, simply because he already lives like that. He cooks all his own food, and it’s very good food—by and large low in fat, high in vegetables and fruits. He rarely puts any salt in the food. He doesn’t drink much any more—certainly not the way he used to—and he quit smoking twenty or thirty years ago. He exercises enthusiastically and with pleasure, every day. And he has few sources of emotional stress.
BiS remarked that an element of genetics comes into play with cardiac disease. His mother did die of cardiac problems, but not until she was in her 80s. You’ve gotta die of something, eh? The aunts and uncles are similarly long-lived. His dad died young of Parkinson’s disease brought on by exposure to chemicals in the cleaning plant where he worked, so we don’t know if he might have developed heart disease later in life—but at least one of the aged uncles is on the father’s side. Consider: this guy is 70 years old and he has relatives in his parents’ generation who are still living.
What will be will be, I guess. Meanwhile, just in case…this old bat is off for a vigorous walk, before the sun comes up.
Update:
So here he is, climbing into his car under the doting care of a pretty young nurse. He must be lapping it up. SiL sent this picture… This afternoon he sounded almost like his old self and was looking forward to a fifteen-minute walk (at least) around the neighborhood in the cool of the evening.
People talk about establishingseveral income streams to increase net household income, pay off debt, and build a safety net for hard times. I certainly have advocated that more than once, because I’ve done it and it’s worked well for me. A small, unsteady income from freelance editing combined with taking on a few courses at the Great Desert University and then at a community college earned enough to pay off the second mortgage on my house, leaving my house free and clear before I was laid off, and helped establish a $14,500 emergency fund, which, in a pinch, would cover a year’s worth of living expenses.
So…how did I manage to cobble that much together, when I certainly didn’t net $35,900 ($21,400 went to pay off the loan) in those two semesters of part-time teaching?
Well, you’ve heard ofsnowflaking, whereby we put every little windfall and every extra few pennies toward debt? I think of this as snowmelt into savings streams. For some years before I was laid off, I had several savings streams:
• One was a regular credit-union share savings account, into which I put a base amount of $200 a month. In addition, I also deposited any windfalls in here: the annual American Express card rebate, manufacturers’ rebates, gifts, whatever. In palmier days, come to think of it, I usually put the AMEX rebate into a Roth IRA, but that’s another story.
• Another was a money market savings account, into which I put everything I netted off sidestream jobs—teaching and freelancing—plus any other windfalls that came my way. This was the primary savings for the loan payoff.
• A third was a money market checking account. Each month as paychecks came in I moved $1,500 here, to cover the $1,500 a month I budgeted for credit-card spending. This represented discretionary spending, as opposed to monthly bills that have to be paid come hell or high water. Usually, I spent significantly less than this. Any money that was left over stayed in money market checking.
• A fourth was another share savings account at the credit union. It held a monthly $325 self-escrow to pay annual property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and auto insurance.
• And a fifth savings stream was a Vanguard Prime Money Market Fund, into which I put 30% of all freelance income—a set-aside to pay income taxes and my tax preparer.
Three of the five monthly “snowmelts” happened as automatic transfers: on the first of the month, $1,500 was moved to money market checking to cover discretionary expenses; on the last, $200 went to monthly savings and $325 went to tax & insurance savings. Instead of “paying myself first,” I kept that $525 in my primary checking account until the last of the month to ensure that no checks would bounce. They never did. But in Quicken I deducted the amount from the bottom line, so I would always know what was left in the account with those savings streams flowing out.
In other words, what I left in checking from each month’s pay was only enough to cover monthly nondiscretionary expenses. Funds for costs over which I had some real, credible control were paid from the credit card budget, which flowed into an account specifically to pay off the card in full each month.
Because the discretionary budget is based on summer expenses, which are about $300 higher than late fall, winter, and early spring costs, over time quite a bit of leftover money quietly accumulated in regular checking, just as it was quietly accumulating in the discretionary spending account (because I rarely used all my discretionary budget).
It’s surprising how much money accrues—and how painlessly it accrues—when you make savings streams a part of your financial life. When I was finally laid off last December, I was pleased to find something over $28,000 lurking in the credit union. That was after the second mortgage was paid.
Admittedly, a credit union or bank account is not the best place to stash 28 grand. I simply hadn’t registered how much had accrued in the various accounts that I wasn’t deliberately using as savings accounts. When you added the serendipitous savings that resulted from living within my means to the deliberate savings, it came to quite a lot. I moved $14,000 to investments and kept $14,500 as this year’s “cushion,” knowing that with Social Security’s stringent earned-income limit, 2010 would be tight.
Although 2010 is tight, I still haven’t lost the savings-stream habit. In semiretirement, I no longer feel the need to save as much—largely because I no longer live in fear of layoffs. And restructuring The Copyeditor’s Desk from a sole proprietorship to an S-corporation changed its tax structure, so I don’t have to set aside a chunk of dough to cover taxes on freelance enterprises.
• I’m now keeping all budgeted spending money—discretionary as well as nondiscretionary—in my primary checking account. Because I’ve undershot both budgets all winter…uhm, well…ahem…until the great Shopping Spree Episode…about $2,100 extra has accrued in there. So it’s a de facto savings account, although I expect to spend that money over the summer, when teaching income dries up.
• Regular monthly savings still gets its $200/month deposit, plus all other small windfalls. As a matter of fact, this is where the $700 to cover the clothing frenzy will come from. With over 14 grand sitting in checking as a gigantic emergency fund, the regular monthly savings account, which I used to regard as “emergency” savings, is now a diddle-it-away fund.
• Another $325 still goes into the self-escrow account each month. Taxes and insurance being unavoidable, that one’s not an option. Starting this month, I’ll add another $90/month to that, to cover the annual cost of Medigap insurance.
• The corporate account now collects all freelance and blogging income. With an S-corporation, you pay yourself a salary, which can be fairly modest as long as it recompenses you reasonably for the work you do as the corporation’s director (which ain’t much). The money that remains in the corporation can be used to cover your incorporated enterprise’s operating expenses (such as computer equipment, office supplies, server space). Money that you draw out after you’ve been paid your salary is treated as dividend income. To date, I haven’t needed any of that money to live on. So, the corporate account also functions as a de facto savings account.
Even though I’m now unemployed (or, we might say, “underemployed”…in a big way), with a total gross income of about 58% of what I earned at the Great Desert University, money is still flowing through four income streams (teaching, Social Security, a small pension drawdown, and the incorporated freelance enterprise) into three formal savings streams (tax & insurance, regular monthly savings, and the corporate account) plus an informal savings stream in the form of unspent cash in regular checking.
Savings streams ensure that there’ll always be enough to cover those ugly recurring tax and insurance bills, plus something to pay for the occasional indulgence. Consequently, my lifestyle has really not changed much, despite the 42 percent cut in income. Thanks to a few small income streams and savings streams.
So I’m sitting here sweltering through a crush of semester-end stoont papers when what should pop up in the e-mail but a last-minute call for someone to teach a humanities course in the first summer session at a different campus in the community college district. Money happens!
Now at last, folks, we’re talkin’ fair wage: a summer session runs for five weeks; $2,400 for a month and a week of light work comes under the heading of decent pay. Although my Ph.D. is in English, not humanities per se, my undergraduate degree is in French language and literature. “Humanities” is a vague term that used to mean “classics” but now means almost nothing—as a practical matter, colleges will hire people with almost any degree in the liberal arts to teach these courses. And the beauty of these courses is that assessment can be largely through online tests. Naturally, one would like to assign a term paper or a couple of shorter papers, but they don’t have to be parsed for mechanics and style. People grade these things on the basis of whether the student seems to have responded to the assignment and done the reading, rather than for the student’s writing skill.
Piece. of. cake.
It would push me over the Social Security earnings limit by about $350. More than that, really, because I’ll have to take a “salary” from the S-corporation in December. However, it could be worth it: barring another market crash, I’ll have enough cash to weather a month without the Social Security payment (loss of which is one of the consequences of exceeding the limit).
More to the point, we don’t know that either of the two courses I’m lined up to teach in the fall will make. They’re set up as two eight-week sessions, back-to-back, English 101 first followed by an online feature-writing course. The idea that a freshman comp student will sign up to sit through two three-hour sessions a week verges on the preposterous. And the feature-writing course will follow a nearly identical in-class section a colleague will teach in the first half of the semester.
BTW, if anyone would like to sign up for that feature-writing class (it’s billed as “magazine writing”), it’s 100 percent online, and there’s no out-of-state tuition for online courses. If you’re a blogger, I probably would accept posts that fit the parameters of the assignments—these will include things like a profile, a straight report, an opinion piece, a brite, a how-to, a round-up, or whatever else I can dream up. The course is English 235, Magazine Article Writing; it runs from 10/18 to 12/10/2010. You can register online; from what I can tell, you need to start by getting admitted through this site. There’s a phone number: 602-787-7020.
Anyway, back on topic: I’m less than thrilled at the prospect of working away half the first real summer break I’ve had in 20 years. On the other hand, trying to get through the summer on less than half the income I’ve had this semester is a little scary, plus next fall’s semester will pay $2,400 less than I’ve been earning. The hot season pushes utility and water bills through the roof, and that coincides perfectly with the switch to Medicare, which also will elevate my health coverage bills significantly.
I’m thinking it may be worth having a month’s worth of Social Security taxed at 50%. From what I’m told, the minute the IRS finds out you’re going to exceed the annual earnings limit, they withhold an entire month’s SS benefit. From that they subtract the amount they figure you owe in the tax rip-off—but you don’t get the remainder of the money back until the following January! So the punishment for exceeding the earnings limit is effectively the loss of a full month’s SS income. That’s pretty hefty, when it represents half your net income.
But it may be worth it, to be sure there’s enough to live on over the summer. Maybe.
