In the near future, Funny about Money will transform into a monetized site. The doughty Mrs. Micah, who has started a blog consulting service, is helping to make the changeover.
This is a scary adventure for moi, because I’m really not very techie. But you turn into a pillar of salt if you don’t keep trying to learn new things. 🙂
The design will be slightly different. We have found a three-column template that’s very similar to the present White as Milk theme, so I hope the change won’t be too jarring.
Funny’s traffic has been steadily increasing ever since it moved to WordPress.com. It’s now averaging nine or ten thousand discrete hits a month, which I think may be enough to generate a small income from advertising.
The site doesn’t have to make much to be very helpful. Until I’m 66, I’m not allowed to earn more than $14,000 without having Social Security docked. What that means is that every $2,400 Funny earns between January and August is a freshman comp course I won’t have to teach in the fall. If we get this project up and running now, we should know by layoff day, December 30, how much Funny will earn.
This morning it was off to Paradise Valley Community College, for an interview with the English department chair.
Item: I nailed not one, not two, but three adjunct courses, which should net around five grand between now and the time I’m canned.
Item: This guy treated me like a human being, of all the bizarre things!
No joke. He gave me the grand tour of the campus—even took me to view the classrooms where I’ll be teaching!—and, after introducing me to faculty members, the departmental secretary, the head librarian, and some people whose functions I didn’t catch, delivered me in person to HR. I couldn’t believe it.
Bizarrely, people working there don’t give the impression of having been beaten down like so much threshed wheat. Morale seems nowhere near the basement, where it resides at a certain vast desert university. People were cheerful, they looked rested, they appeared enthusiastic and active. If they’re faking it, they’re doing an impressive job.
The campus is quite attractive. It borders a golf course (!) and is set amid tracts of newish middle- to upper-middle-class housing. Buildings are clean, bright, and sunny. None of them smells of the solvent used to remove asbestos, as does (still!) a certain building of which we know.
The chair forked over a list of requirements and desiderata for the college’s freshman comp courses. Incredibly, you only have to assign four papers in English 101 and three in English 102. The jaw drops. To put the jaw on the floor, courses are capped at 25. This will be so astonishingly easy.
The $5,000 I should net from this part-time gig can go into savings to help the transition into penury. Anything I happen to pick up from freelancing will be stashed for the same purpose.
From there it was over to the financial advisor’s.
What’s been keeping me awake at night—what has driven me to the quack in search of soothing drugs—is the certainty that no matter how I work the numbers, the combination of a 4 percent drawdown from savings, my piddling Social Security entitlement, and the $14,000 I can earn without losing SS dollars is just plain not enough to survive on. First, I can’t live on it. Second, I most certainly can’t pay my part of the mortgage, either, and we will have to default on the Investment House. Default. Walk away. Be stripped of honor and credit. Lose our shirts. Both of us, me and M’hijito. Oh, God!
Well, Advisor pointed out that I could actually draw down a little more than that without risk of ruination. He also pointed out that M’hijito should be able to carry more of the mortgage, which would make it possible for his aged mother to stop worrying and maybe even to stay out from under the Seventh Avenue Overpass. Drawing down enough to live on will reduce the expected lifetime of my savings from 100 years to 50 years. Since I don’t plan to live another 50 years, this should be a reasonable strategy.
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
The title is, hilariously enough, “Résumé.”
Tell me she didn’t foresee the joys of entering résumé details into online job application forms.
😀
Well, yesterday afternoon I learned another way to get quick access to medical care: say (or even just imply) that you’re considering offing yourself. I called to make an appointment with my favorite medico at the Mayo, by way of trying to wangle some antidepressants from the guy. I’m wrecking my jaw and hearing with the tooth-clenching, which has returned with a vengeance; some sites say antidepressants sometimes will cause that quirk to back off. To get in to a Mayo doctor, you have to wriggle past a gatekeeper with the melodramatic title of “triage nurse.”
So I’m explaining the situation and trying to persuade her that the stress level is such that I do need to see my doctor. She asks me if I’ve been considering suicide, and without thinking I answer that the thought has crossed my mind (which indeed it has: sure would resolve a lot of problems!).
Hee hee! Freaked her right out. So now I have an appointment this afternoon. This, despite my having reassured her that I was not serious. Maybe I could’ve gotten in yesterday afternoon if I’d remarked in passing that the birds were mightycute out there on the window ledge.
Today I applied for three jobs, around our clients’ e-mails and the phone’s jangling and the staff’s worried questions. Two of them, I’m probably not qualified for (but nothing ventured, nothing gained). One, I could do with exceptional panache, but the language in the posting subtly suggests they have in mind a twenty-something, or at worst a crotchety old thirty-something.
And therein lies the most discouraging element of my post-layoff prospects: age discrimination. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that anyone is going to hire a soon-to-be 64-year-old woman. The sense that I’ve got to keep trying anyway, even though I don’t have even the remotest shot at getting hired, is agonizingly frustrating. To say the least.
And here’s an even more elegant frustration: technology that wastes my time and ultimately wastes the employer’s time.
All three prospective employers asked that applicants first upload a résuméand then retype almost every line of the résuméinto online forms, often in a format that makes it difficult or impossible to copy and paste.
What is the point? If you’ve already got the whole résumé, why have the applicant keyboard all the information in again, line by freaking line? What a crushing time-waster! It took a good three hours to perform what should have been three 30-second tasks.
And imagine the time wasted on the other end! Someone has to plow through all those dreary, redundant lines. Probably more than one someone: at most colleges and universities, search committees have at least three people, and often an admin assistant runs interference by reading and screening applications first.
So what we have here is a procedure that unnecessarily wastes at least five people’s time!
Other than limiting the number of job applications any one supplicant can send out in a day, what, really, is the point? And how does this permutation of technology make our lives better?
As my beloved dean and her crafty colleagues were feting me for my alleged 15th year of labor at the Great Desert University, it occurred to me to wonder, again, why they think I’ve been there 15 years when I think I’ve been there 16 years. If they’re right, then my CV is wrong. If they’re wrong, then I’m about to get shorted a significant amount of severance pay. Luckily, I keep every shred of paper that even vaguely resembles financial records.
Yesterday afternoon, I got into the dusty old file cabinet that resides in the garage. What should I find but a tax return strongly suggesting that GDU paid me for a lot more than one adjunct section! A little more excavation, and up came a file folder packed with old pay statements.
And yea, verily. My first full-time paycheck was issued in August 1993: sixteen long years ago.
This means HR is either one semester or one full year off in its records. That error is worth either $720 or $1,440 to me. When employees have been with the state for a while, their sick leave accrues. At 500 hours, it’s worth 1/3 of your hourly rate when you leave your job for whatever reason; at 1,000 hours it’s worth 1/2 your hourly rate. I have almost 1,200 hours.
At the time, sick leave was accruing at the rate of 4 hours a paycheck, adding as much as 96 hours to my present accrual (assuming HR’s records are a full year off). At $15 per hour, that totes up to a nice sum, even if they’re only off a half-year.
Keep your financial records! Store them in a safe place, and keep them forever, not for the seven years recommended by tax experts. If I hadn’t squirreled all my old paychecks away, I would have no way of proving when I really started full-time at GDU.
I learned this trick from my ex-husband, a corporate lawyer. He kept every scrap of paper that had anything to do with anything. He was so extreme that he had all our canceled checks returned to us, and he stored them tidily in a bureau drawer. Year after year after year of canceled checks, all lined up like little micron-thick soldiers…
Well, I’m don’t go that far, but I do keep my pay statements, my tax returns, and receipts for major purchases such as the roof job, appliances, and computers. Anything that’s tax-related probably should be stored permanently. Clutter? Yes. It’s a nuisance to find room for a four-drawer file cabinet and stash all this junk in it.
But. The squirreling habit paid off for me yesterday.
Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D.’s wife Kris has posted this month’s report on the great gardening experiment. I love these posts! It’s such a hoot to watch their progress and to view all the photos Kris and J.D. put online. One of the insights their experience (and, thanks to their inspiration, my own) has brought is that a garden, properly managed, amounts to a de facto income stream. Yea, verily: an under-the-radar, nontaxable income stream!
This winter (the best growing time in Arizona), I’ve managed to grow a surprising amount of food in a very small space. The only places I have to grow vegetables are a small flowerbed next to the pool and a half-dozen big pots set in the few backyard spots that get direct sun most of the day. But I’ve been harvesting chard and beet greens all winter. The carrots are now ready to eat, and the beets, while less than perfectly successful, will suffice for a few meals.
The trees also qualify as garden citizens. I’ve been scarfing candy-sweet oranges—six to ten of them a day—since last January, and some fruit still remains. The Meyer lemon bore amazing juicy lemons the size of grapefruits, a bunch of which remain to be squeezed and frozen. The lime tree bears almost year-round.
Think of it: one dinky little lemon costs 50 or 60 cents. I’ll have enough juice in the freezer to stock the kitchen until the tree comes back into fruit. Though the freezer is full of grocery-store frozen veggies, I hardly eat the stuff, because I have so much fresh produce growing in the backyard.
Preparing garden vegetables for the freezer is surprisingly easy. The other day I put up a passel of beets and beet greens for future use.
Wash the fresh-picked vegetables well.
1. Bring a big pot of water to the boil. 2. Meanwhile, fill the sink with cold water and add a bunch of ice to make it really cold. 3. Dip the clean vegetables into the boiling water. 4. Watch closely. Let them seethe just long enough for leafy things to turn bright green, or for a couple minutes for things like beets and carrots. Don’t overcook. 5. Using a slotted spoon or strainer, dip the vegetables out of the hot water and quickly plunge them into the icy water. 6. As soon as the heat is chilled out of them, lay them out on paper or fabric towels. Cover with more toweling. Pat dry. 7. When the produce is as dry as you can get it, divide it into storage bags, label the bags with the contents and date, and stash them in the freezer.
Some foods may be better cooked before freezing. For example, a fair amount of butternut squash, baked with honey and sweet spices, resides in the freezer just now. Ditto scalloped potatoes. The beauty of fully cooking the produce is that all you have to do is defrost the stuff and it’s ready to eat. The upside of blanching and freezing it is that you have produce ready to prepare in any number of different recipes.
And the real beauty of it: the freshest of all possible food sitting in the backyard at all times!
To expand on the idea of garden as income stream, I’d like to suggest that to make this work, we need to keep the basic cost of the garden under control. It’s easy for the cost of a backyard garden to outstrip the cost of the best organic produce from Whole Foods. This winter’s farming project points to a few guidelines:
1. Avoid gardening in pots, if at all possible. If you have a patch of ground, use it.
In the first place, most plants prefer to grow in the ground. But more to the frugalist’s point, even if you can get the pot on the cheap, you still have to fill it with dirt. In my part of the country, soil is clayey (sometimes concrete-like…) and doesn’t drain well in a pot. Because potted plants need excellent drainage, you either have to fill the pot with store-bought potting soil (!! expensive) or mix potting soil, home-made compost, and dirt from the ground about a third/a third/a third. The ground is happy if you just spade in some compost or manure.
2. Use seeds.
Plant sets are expensive. Seeds are cheap.
If you live in a place where winters are cold, start your own plant sets in the house before the ground warms up. No fancy equipment is needed for this project: visit Simply Forties and check out Mary’s idea of using TP rolls as plant pots for baby veggies.
You can buy seeds for neat varieties of many vegetables. And in many cases you can get seeds from grocery-store vegetables to grow. Out in the back yard just now, a horde of green things that came out of a Safeway butternut squash are hollering “Feed me, Seymour!” With any luck, these and the cantaloupe plants growing next to them will provide a fine harvest later in the summer.
3.Make friends with other gardeners.
Not only will you learn a lot about growing plants, gardeners often share extra plants with their friends. This is a great way to get free plants (free food!) and a great way to find new homes for extra little critters that grow from seeds or tubers in your own garden.
4. Make your own compost.
After the demise of my composter, I started a new batch in an aged plastic plant pot, which provides drainage for extra moisture. Putting an old plastic pot saucer over the top keeps it warm, fosters anaerobes, and allows me to flip compost over once every week or two. It already has is almost ready to use in the ground. You don’t need to buy an expensive lash-up for composting. A hole in the ground and a pitchfork make a fine low-tech composting system.
Faced with penury, my plan now is to use some space in the Investment House’s backyard to enlarge the agricultural enterprise. M’hijito, a talented gardener, has agreed that this will be OK, and so I hope to get some beans and melons going over there this summer. And with any luck, the Funny Farm here at my house will produce carrots, tomatoes, butternut squash, cantaloupe, basil, onions, and the usual parsley, thyme, sage, mint, tarragon, and marjoram.
Every bite that we don’t have to buy at a market represents a savings ranging from a few cents to a few dollars. This savings is accentuated if you incline to buy organic. So, if you can keep the cost of operating the garden within reason, over time the garden itself creates an in-kind income stream.
