Coffee heat rising

Beloved Yard Dude Gone

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Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.

Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicity racist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.

Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.

So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.

Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.

At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.

I’m impressed:

1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.

2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.

3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.

4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.

5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.

6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.

And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.

I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.

Image by Ginobovara, Wikipedia Commons

Food of Frankenstein

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Lovely to look at, delightful to touch, but if you eat it...???
Lovely to look at, delightful to touch, but if you eat it...???

So…you thought that documentary about food production I put you on to a while back was over the top, eh?

Evidently not. Take a look at this, will you please? Maybe I’m being altogether too credulous about this stuff…but given a bent for skepticism that fades toward the cynical, I doubt it.

Buy local.

Buy organic.

It does make a difference.

Image:
Fastily, Wikipedia Creative Commons

The high cost of Medicare

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In a comment to my recent post about planning for the pending layoff/retirement/whatever-we’re-calling-it, Abigail asks about the costs of Medicare, which I estimate will be around $300. I’ll be eligible for Medicare in May of 2010. So, between the December 31 canning date and May I’ll have to take COBRA, which will cost about $480 a month.

Medicare alone doesn’t cover all your costs: it’s an 80-20 plan. The older you get, the shorter the odds that you’ll suffer a catastrophically expensive illness. Heart bypass surgery, for example, can cost $170,000; 20 percent of that would be $34,000, which you have to pay out of pocket. Cancer treatment can quickly mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly, if you have to pay 20 percent of costs like that, a major illness—almost inevitable in old age—will pauperize you.

To protect yourself, you have to buy a supplemental policy called “Medigap” insurance. You also are required—it’s not an option—to take and pay for prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D. By law, Medicare Part B and Medigap insurance provide no prescription coverage. If you decline to sign up for Part D when you start Medicare and then later change your mind, you are gouged royally for the privilege of signing up later.

To be fully covered, you have to cobble together coverage with the standard Medicare Part A (which is free), Medicare Part B (which costs about $100 a month), Medicare Part D (which evidently runs about $30 to $65 a month but which, if you suffer an illness that requires expensive drug therapy, will leave you holding the bag for upwards of $4,350), and Medigap insurance (provided by private insurers, apparently ranging in cost from an average of about $100 to about $285 a month—it’s next to impossible to find out what the actual costs are). By the time you’ve added up Part B, Part D, and Medigap, you end up with a monthly cost of about $300 a month. That amount will never go down, and you can be sure that like every other cost else in life, it will continue to rise.

At this time, the combined cost of full Medicare coverage is about 12 times what I pay for my employer’s EPO plan, which covers my doctor of 30 years. Since 1987, he has practiced at the Mayo. The Mayo Clinic, because of Medicare’s low reimbursement rates, now refuses to accept new patients who are covered by Medicare. They will keep you if you’re already an active patient, but if you walk in off the street and you’re covered by Medicare, they won’t take you.

You can opt out of the public system and instead buy private insurance through Medicare Part C. These plans are basically HMOs, and they are dangerous. They’re extremely restrictive—you have little or no choice as to which doctors you see, and like all HMOs they’re not in business to take care of you; they’re in business to make a profit. Consequently, it’s in their interest to limit the amount and quality of healthcare you get and to direct you to the cheapest providers.

Now, the problem is that hospitals in Arizona are about as good as schools in Arizona, which is to say “not very.” It was at one of our major regional health centers where I waited over four hours with acute appendicitis and never saw so much as a triage nurse. When I finally got to the Mayo’s ER, they slapped me into surgery instantly. In another major hospital, my mother-in-sin underwent successful aortic surgery but almost died because, while recuperating in a hospital room, she had a heart attack that went unnoticed by anyone but a CLEANING LADY! Her life was saved because a maid happened to wander into the room and figured something was wrong.

Only one hospital in Arizona consistently gets top national ratings, and it’s the Mayo. That’s why you need to retain your choice of doctors and medical facilities, no matter how much that privilege costs you.

Wonderful dinner

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Last week, M’hijito had me over for a delightful meal at his house. The guy can really cook. I think I mentioned the amazing potato pie he made. At the outset, he’d said we’d scallop some potatoes. This was the upshot:

It was one of the tastiest potato anythings that I have ever enjoyed. He didn’t follow a recipe; he just made it up as he went. Here, approximately, is how it came together:

You need:

• 2 Idaho potatoes, thinly sliced
• a small red onion, thinly sliced
• a handful of chives
• 1 or 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• leaves from a sprig of rosemary
• butter
• heavy cream
• a pastry brush
• an oven-proof pan 

Melt a fair amount of butter—probably half a cube or more. Slice the potatoes an onions thin—a mandoline helps with this. 

Arrange a layer of potato slices in the bottom of the pan. Brush a generous amount of melted butter over the top. Sprinkle on some chopped garlic, and arrange some of the sliced onion over the potatoes. Add another layer of potato slices. Brush butter over these. Add remaining onion, and place a handful of whole fresh chive leaves (no need to cut them up) over the top of this layer. Now top the dish with another layer of sliced potatoes. Add cream, but don’t smother the top layer in cream. Sprinkle rosemary leaves over the top.

Ianpotato2

Bake in a 375-degree oven about 45 minutes or an hour, until scrumptiously brown and crisp on top.

Along with the potato pie, he served grilled Costco steaks and sea scallops, wrapped in bacon. With a bottle of wine, it made an awesome dinner.

Older houses: Living better with less?

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Sometimes I think the modest things I have in life are so much better than anything I could buy for a zillion dollars. Maybe I suffer from the sour-grapes syndrome. But…well, you tell me. Is this sour grapes or common sense?

The hall with the unbounded ceiling
The hall with the boundless ceiling

This morning La Maya invited me to go with her to an estate sale in one of the tonier parts of the far northwest Valley. The sale organizer touted “upscale” goods in a “4,000-square-foot house.” So shortly after dawn cracked, we set out for the ocean of orange tile roofs that is the westside.

When we got to the neighborhood where the sale took place, we found ourselves in one of those curvilinear tracts where all the stuccoed houses look pretty much the same. This HOA dictated dust-brown paint with mud-brown trim. It being a fancy tract, some of the houses had stone facades: dirt-brown granite, every one. If you came home late at night and three sheets to the wind, you’d never figure out which of the half-million-dollar shacks was yours.

But seriously: the area was clean, obviously expensive, and very nice. I guess.

Inside the target house, we found more beige paint and brown stone, plus lots of very expensive designer furniture, mostly brown. And huge. There was a freeway-sized L-shaped leather sectional, big enough to accommodate a theater full of movie patrons. A fat chair and ottoman that would seat three children and a labrador retriever. A leather-topped desk and $999 leather desk chair. An outlandish leather-covered ultra-king-sized bed. And on and on. 

All this stuff needed to be huge, because the house’s stratospheric ceilings created so much empty, soulless space that you felt you were inside a cave. But nothing about the size or the priciness of the furniture made the house feel like anything other than a showplace for some interior decorator’s contract project. The overall effect was about as cozy as a hotel lobby.

Houses in outlying suburbs here are notorious for their shoddy construction. When we went into the professionally landscaped backyard with its spectacular outdoor kitchen and elegant two-level pool, what should we see but gaping structural cracks just about everyplace we looked. One wing of the stuccoed structure that held a gas grill, a sink, a refrigerator, and storage cabinets had pulled loose from its adjacent segment. The second level of the pool arrangement had two big splits, one on the north side and one on the south: given time and a few soaking rains, the whole lash-up will collapse into the luxuriantly finished lower pool. 

The house itself looked sound…but it’s hard to tell. A skilled craftsman can cover a wealth of sins with stucco. A single crack of the sort we saw out back would create some serious homeowner headaches.

Inside, every ceiling, even over the halls and closet-sized bathrooms, was a good 16 feet high, creating vast walls to have to dust and paint—you couldn’t paint them yourself, because you’d need scaffolding to do the job. God only knows how many cubic yards of empty space had to be needlessly air-conditioned. And the effect?

Well, after we left, I remarked to La Maya that the house seemed kind of depressing. She agreed: she said the towering walls struck her as cold and unfriendly. I said I didn’t think the house could possibly be 4,000 square feet—it was only three bedrooms, none of which was significantly larger than the rooms in our houses, and although it had a generous family room and kitchen, there were only two other public rooms: a dining alcove and what must have been intended as a formal living room (the owners used it to house a pool table). She speculated that the high ceilings somehow, by a trick of perspective, made the interior seem smaller. 

Could be. The house wasn’t really a house. It was a warehouse partitioned with plasterboard masquerading as walls, any one of which you could punch your fist through without bruising your knuckles. For a half-million dollars or more, the owners had themselves a cheaply built barn better sized for giraffes than for humans, a dwelling with the mood of an empty train station.

Both of us came away feeling that our houses, which certainly cost nothing like what those shacks do, are so far superior that we wouldn’t think of trading “up” to such a place. At the outset, neither of us wants to live in an outer arm of the galaxy. But more to the point, our homes are proportioned to fit people. People who actually live in a house. Simply by the way they’re built, with rooms that enclose living space, not empty air, they start out more inviting. The saltillo tiles throughout La Maya’s and M’hijto’s houses, the none-too-airtight banks of sunny windows and French doors, the varying ceiling heights and floor levels, the generous yards, the diverse and variegated neighborhoods…

The 60-year-old tract house M’hijito and I are copurchasing in the central part of town is, amazingly, vastly more pleasant and charming than any shiny new styrofoam-and-stucco affair out in the far-flung suburbs. Besides being close to everything—he’s within bicycling distance of work and walking distance of the new light rail system, to say nothing of the shopping and restaurants he can walk to or reach in a five-minute drive—it’s sweetly charming and it has a vast yard, which we soon will transform into a fine, shady xeriscapic garden. The double-course red brick walls have an air pocket between two layers of block and are finished on the inside with lath and plaster. Almost a foot thick, the walls insulate the interior so that on a 95-day degree day the house needs no air conditioning to stay comfortable indoors. 

My own tract house, now 38 years old, has its own charms: centrally located on a large lot, it’s bright and cheerful with lots of natural lighting; its five citrus trees produce a never-ending supply of oranges, lemons, and limes; it has an almost trouble-free pool; and its bedrooms are huge by new-construction standards. 

La Maya and La Bethulia’s house, a cut above mine and in the pricier neighborhood a block closer to the park, is paved throughout with genuine, antique Saltillos, unlike any flooring you can get today and absolutely gorgeous. So are the walls full of French doors that look out onto the pool area and into the front courtyard. A previous owner added a wing on the front parallel to the garage, converting what was an early snout house into a hacienda wrapped around a sylvan courtyard with a wall fountain, gardens, and a flowering peach tree. 

All three houses fit human beings. Because they were designed on a human scale, they feel like homes and not like partitioned barns. They’re comfortable to live in, places you want to come home to. Not only that, but they’re furnished with stuff that matters to us: with tables and chairs that belonged to our mothers; with bedsteads we picked out for ourselves, without benefit of an interior decorator; with things that were given to us or pieces we scored at estate sales. Ceilings vary in height from seven to ten or twelve feet, but none enclose a volume of wasted space. The houses look and behave like places people live in.

Our houses cost nothing like the eave-to-eave palaces we saw out in the hinterlands this morning. But we think they’re better. We think they’re built better, they look better, and they live better.

Are we imagining things? Or is less really more?

Planning for layoff-induced “retirement”

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In a moment of lucidity, I realized that of course if my basic survival account is padded with a five- or ten thousand-dollar cushion, what will matter in “retirement” is not month-by-month income (earnings will fluctuate wildly because teaching money will come only in spring and fall), but how much I will earn on average. That is, after the layoff, I won’t be living on bimonthly paychecks. I’ll be living on a fund of money that is restocked once a month from a variety of sources. 

When income from these sources runs low, I’ll have to use some of the cushion to live on. But when income rises while community college classes are in session, the cushion should be replenished, assuming my average costs don’t overrun average income.

Thinking about this the other day, I realized to my amazement that—any way you look at it!—my income in forced retirement will be higher than my salary. Unfortunately, the changed circumstances of retirement will make that irrelevant, because costs will rise significantly. However…there it is.

When GDU is paying my full salary, the net is $3,044. The pay cut created by two furlough days a month has reduced my take-home pay to $2,836.

My financial advisor says that with a 5 percent drawdown, my savings will last 100 years. At 7% the money would last 50 years. A 5 percent drawdown plus Social Security plus teaching income should create a net of $3,288, assuming the total tax gouge is around 20 percent. 

This looks wonderful, eh? Well…not so fast.

Even though my net monthly expenses will drop because I’ve paid off the second mortgage on my house and because I will cash in the whole life insurance policy as soon as this tax year ends, it still won’t be enough.

Right now I’m paying my share of the mortgage on the downtown house with a small drawdown from my largest IRA. In other words, I’m not paying the mortgage out of my salary. That cost will have to be folded in to the 5 percent survival drawdown—in fake “retirement,” I will have to help pay the mortgage out of money I would ordinarily use to live on.

Even that would be manageable…except for Medicare.

Medicare, Medicare Part D, and Medigap insurance will cost twelve times what I’m paying for health insurance now! And that will run my average costs over $3,288 a month.

Freelance income might take up the slack, but it’s so sporadic and so unreliable, I’m not including it as a source of average monthly income. As we’ve seen, the likelihood that I can keep my credit card charges down to $1,200 is slim, and so overruns of this tight little budget are probable and may be frequent. All it will take is one vet bill or one repair bill to run the thing deep into the red.

It looks like I’ll be forced to take a 6 percent drawdown, even though I don’t want to and even though I think it’s highly ill-advised.

One pool repair bill runs upwards of $115. You can’t walk into the vet’s office for less than $100. A pair of glasses costs $300. As you can see, then, at 6 percent I’ll get by…but it’ll be tight. Very, very tight. 

Probably some freelance money will continue to flow in, maybe as much as two or three hundred dollars a month. whoop-de-doo!

Yesterday I dropped by the college, where the departmental chairman was hanging out with the secretary. They said not to worry about enrollments: because the college nullifies unpaid early enrollments and community college students are just as broke as the rest of us, most people wait until the week before classes start to sign up for classes. The chair was confident all three classes would make, but, he said, even if they don’t, he still has several unstaffed sections. He said he was sure I would end up, willy-nilly, with three sections. 

So that will help to fill up the fund that I’ll be living on after December.

And it’s pretty clear there’ll be no problem landing three sections a semester as long as I can dodder onto a college campus. GDU has so massively shot itself in the foot—in both feet!—by jacking up tuition, adding a per-credit surcharge to the inflated tuition, and by generally mistreating students that vast numbers of students who would qualify to get into the university are going to the community colleges for their first two years. 

It will be a very long time before the university recovers from its own missteps and from our right-wing legislators’ fierce, vengeful animosity toward higher education, set loose by the departure of Governor Janet Napolitano, who was able to keep the kookocracy under control to some degree. The universities in this state, especially GDU, have been permanently damaged by the crash of the Bush economy and actions of the surviving extremists in our elected offices.

It’s too bad—a disaster, really, for our state—but on a selfish, personal level…what redounds to the junior colleges’ benefit may redound to mine.

Projected cash flow at 5% drawdown
Projected cash flow at 5% drawdown; red = outgo