Coffee heat rising

Life at the Funny Farm: This and that

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What a lovely quiet day here at the Funny Farm, as far away from the Great Desert University as one can get. Cassie and I hung out for an hour or so at the park, one of the nicest neighborhood parks in the city. I’ll try to remember to take the camera tomorrow.

Weekday mornings and afternoons, with the kids in school and most of the grown-ups at work, the park is almost empty, except for a few SAHMs playing with their toddlers on the climbing array and the swings. When the weather’s nice (which is most of the time), it’s a perfect bumhood retreat. I’ll need to get a new day pack (the old one wore out a couple years ago and, in the absence of hiking and camping, got tossed) so as to carry some drawing and painting gear over there, and maybe some fine iced tea.

Gardening  

dcp_2463From there it was off to Baker’s Nursery to pick up some flats of dichondra. Last time I was there, two or three weekends ago, they had flats of woolly thyme, which I craved to plant between the flagstones off the back patio. Those were gone, so I had to settle for dichondra, though I did find a few small pots of woolly thyme among the herbs, plus some delicate Corsican mint, a couple of low-growing perennials, and two sprigs of hugely invasive and practically unkillable myrtle. The flags, which until recently hosted a little dichondra and a lot of flowering burr clover, were invaded this winter by a noxious little weed that turned into a wiry, ugly mat and killed off the more pleasant weeds. 

Beer Ice Cream

dcp_2461Before turning to the twin projects of digging up the rest of the weeds and planting the new stuff, I tossed together a nice lunch of spaghetti with walnuts, fresh tomato, and basil. At this point I discovered that placing a cold beer into the new deep freezer for as long as it takes to boil a pot of spaghetti and then pouring it into a frozen mug results in a delectable, ice-cold slushy. Very nice!

And so to luncheon on the back patio, where gazing at the new crop of Meyer lemons forming on the tree out back led to a rumination on…

Flat Lemon Juice

Yes. I finally had to pick the last of this spring’s bumper crop of huge lemons, larger than the oranges—some were as big as small grapefruits. Squeezing them produced large quantities of lemon juice. 

At first I started freezing the stuff in muffin tins, a quarter-cup per container. These chunks will be handy for cooking. Just now I have two large freezer bags full of them.

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Then SDXB remarked that pouring the juice, a cup at a time, into small ziplock bags and laying them flat to freeze is a much handier way to store the stuff. It freezes into a thin, flat layer. To use a teaspoonful or a tablespoonful, all you have to do is open the bag and break off a small amount. This way you don’t have to defrost more than you need. Tried this. It works.

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So now I have another couple bags of lemon juice in this format. Shouldn’t have to buy any lemons before the next crop comes ripe!

 

 

 

Cultiver Notre Jardin

dcp_2453The iris came up prettily this spring. The new ones sport an interesting color combination of gold and violet. They didn’t last long—a single 100-degree day fried them.

However, the short blast of summer heat tricked the Easter lily cactus into thinking it was time to bloom, and so it produced its own brief display of startling color.             
 
So it goes.

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Consider the Lilies of the Field

They toil not, neither do they spin. This first day of peremptorily claimed vacation offers a tantalizing view of what life will be like in unemployment. Think of it:

Day after day of hanging out at the park, walking or bicycling the canal, schmoozing with friends, visiting nurseries (and botanical gardens and museums and free midday concerts , tending to one’s garden, puttering in the kitchen. 

How can I count the ways that I can’t wait?

🙂

Layoff: The emotional journey

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche (one of our favorite readers & writers) reports that the predicted layoffs have struck her company and she also is about to join the ranks of the unemployed. We should have quite the campsite, all of us laid-off bloggers dwelling together under the Seventh Avenue Overpass. I propose we call it W-ville. Oh! Sorry. Politics again! 😉

At her site and in a comment to a post below, Revanche describes experiencing a roller-coaster of emotions in response to the anticipation and finally the confirmation of the layoff. Several other bloggers have described wild swings from elation (free at last!) to panic (uh-oh!) to depression (OMG!). Fortunately, she’s managed her money well and has enough to tide her over until 2010, by which time she undoubtedly will have found another job. The panic and depression phases have got to be a lot worse for those of us who haven’t had enough time to shovel out of debt and accrue an emergency fund. But prepared or not, apparently that series of reactions is normal for everyone.

As I remarked some time back, we wouldn’t call it “work” if working were expected to be fun. The vast majority of employees work hard and don’t extract a great deal of personal satisfaction or joy from having to earn a living. But what might be a more or less neutral attitude—i.e., that’s just life—has for many of us turned pretty negative as morale at stressed workplaces heads for the city sewer. Low morale, pinched budgets, and fear make for a toxic environment that anyone in her right mind would be happy to escape. So it makes sense that your first reaction to a pink slip is hallelujah, brother!

The next thought that enters your mind is what on earth am I gonna do? The realization that you’re still going to have to pay your bills and eat, paycheck or no paycheck, is one scary critter. If you’d like to spook yourself a little more, take a look at this interactive feature at Slate.com, an item that will take your breath away. There’s a reason we’re all blogging away at three in the morning: we can’t sleep for worrying. And it’s a good reason.

Then sooner than later, depression sets in. It doesn’t take long to realize that the few employers who have job openings are so swamped with applicants they don’t even bother to respond to your carefully crafted résumé and cover letter. If you’re the kind of person who defines your self-worth according to your job, you feel as though you’re suddenly not worth much. Even if you recognize the important difference between you and what you do, you can’t help but feel that you’ve lost control over your circumstances.

I think there are only three ways to deal with this: plan, plan, and plan.

Plan for your mental health. Lay out some easy-to-follow strategies to keep yourself from going nuts. Most of these are obvious and most are inexpensive: get regular exercise, cultivate friendships, join groups or get more active in the groups you already belong to. Eat well. Stay off the sauce and refrain from using recreational drugs. And especially get yourself out of the house, so you don’t sit around and mope. If you can afford a trip or even just two weeks of informal vacation time at home, give yourself a break during the first days after the layoff.

Plan for the short term. If you have some advance warning—or even if you suspect the ax will fall but don’t know it for sure—build that emergency fund, stock up on food and other necessities. Think through ahead of time how to apply for unemployment, where you will look for work, and what you’ll do until you land a new job. Consider how you might build any current side income streams into bigger or more reliable sources of money. Update your résumé and draft a basic cover letter that you can customize for each job application. And build a list of sites where you can start applying. Don’t forget government agencies, BTW—check out USA Jobs, whose search engine kindly suggests new terms after you’ve entered the keywords that come to mind. If anyone’s hiring, it’ll be the feds.

Plan for the long term. Contact your creditors and try to negotiate short- or long-term ways to ease your loan obligations. Think through whether you can afford to take work at lower pay than the job you just left, and if so, how much lower. Consider whether any alternative kinds of employment would suffice; can you do something altogether different to make a living? Find out whether you can borrow against your 401(k), and if so, how much. Decide how long you can stay in your current circumstances before you have to make a major change, such as renting out a room or subletting your apartment, moving back in with your parents, selling a vehicle, or even defaulting on loan obligations. Think about whether you can relocate, and if so, where. And consider the possibility of going back to school: even though you’ll be racking up student loan debt or borrowing from relatives, at least student loans will keep a roof over your head, you can get health insurance through a college or university, and you’ll be doing something constructive by building new job qualifications.

Some of these are scary prospects. None of us wants to have to think about them. But facing them down and preparing for them does help to rebuild a sense of having some control over your life. I think that feeling of being out of control is the worst contributor to fear and depression. Making some plans, even if they have to be finessed or if they never need to be put into action, goes a long way toward smoothing out the emotional peaks and valleys of the layoff roller-coaster.

Five ways to deal with stress

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Ever have one of those moments when the sky is collapsing on your head at the same time your cat, your dog, your boss, each of your friends, your family members, your banker, a lawyer or two, three doctors, and various functionaries of the police force would like your undivided attention? It’s been kind of like that around here. Every stupid little thing that needs to be tended to plus a number of irrational forces decided to come into play during the week Mrs. Micah and I chose to move my blog and all its bizarre code to a new server. Stress? Let me tell you about stress!

I’ve had all of two full nights’ sleep in something over ten days, and those have come about through liberal doses of Benadryl. Quit dropping a couple of antihistamines before bed-time, and the mental alarm clock goes off at 3:00 a.m. sharp. The internal stress alarm clock has taken to ringing so loud that often pills don’t shut it off. And I’ve now become so sensitized to stress that the most minor hassle has me vibrating like a gong.

Nevertheless, I cling to my theory that pills are not good for you, and that it’s gotta be possible to get a grip without drugging yourself. It worked before, and it’ll work again. So, today I made up my mind to pursue a few fairly simple strategies.

1. Focus on a single challenge or nagging job, deal with it, and get it out of your way.

Select one that’s large enough to make you feel you’ve accomplished something, but not so huge or impossible that you can’t deal with it in a week or so. 

Larger bugabears should be broken down into parts, so that you can address them (to the extent possible) one step at a time. But there’s usually something pestering you that you can get out of the way fairly promptly.

My choice for this weekend is a vast article on the arcane doings of some fourteenth-century French aristocrats, replete with Middle French and medieval Latin: 108 pages of narrative and something over 230 footnotes, many of them archival references. Because I was working on another large, ditzy, and annoying project, I passed it for first edits to our research associate, a young man with a Ph.D. in English who ought to be competent to handle the job. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, our assistant editor in charge of the journal in question sent it back to me, saying the guy had announced he wouldn’t do the job. 

No joke! Quoth he:

I had planned on editing it tonight, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a monograph. It is not even double-spaced. The author set some customized line spacing in this text that looks more like one-and-a-half spacing. Given all the tiny footnotes, this thing is as long as a book.

 

I have to admit that I dread editing this thing. Would you take a look at it and tell me if it’s normal. I don’t want to be a whiner or slacker, but this thing looks like the copyeditor’s equivalent of water-boarding.

If I wasn’t already enjoying the 4:00 a.m. ambience, that did the job. So we agreed that I would edit the first 50 pages and then she (assistant editor) would pass it back to Our Intrepid Hero to read the remaining 57 pages, much of which consists of Latin that he needn’t look at. 

A project like this entails a fair number of global search-&-replace operations, plus you have to pull out the graphics and tables, rewrite the tables so they’re not constructed with hard tabs and spaces, format them to accord with Chicago style, and prepare them for the compositor. Well, of course…since you do that at the start of the job, this will reduce our friend’s workload significantly. Assuming he survives the encounter he will have with me tomorrow morning. 

At any rate: this was a big job. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the weekend doing, but getting it off my desk makes me feel somewhat better. One headache out of the way = (1 zillion headaches – 1).

2. Try to engineer a break.

Leave the kiddies and the pets with a babysitter and go somewhere else. Ideally, give yourself a weekend (or more) away from the stressful situation. Go to a local hotel or B&B (leave the cell phones at home), go camping, go visit friends in some other town or state. Flee!

Luckily for me, I rarely go on vacation, and so vast numbers of use-it-or-lose-it hours have accrued to my credit. All told, by the end of the year, when I’m to be laid off, I’ll have 32.85 days that must be used or forfeited.

So, this afternoon I decided to give myself a little vacation from the salt mine. I have to go out to the office tomorrow, partly to throttle a certain research associate but also to wrap up a few other tasks. My associate editor can take over the job of riding herd on our crew for a week or two. I have a furlough day next Friday, and so with eight of those vacation days, I can engineer thirteen consecutive days away from the place, during which I intend never to check the e-mail or answer the phone.

This is big. Just staying away from the campus and filtering out everything that has to do with the various hassles and annoyances associated with the job will help a great deal.

3. Spend some time with friends who have nothing to do with the source of your stress.

Don’t discuss your problems with them. Have a good time. 

Yesterday SDXB and I did exactly that, driving halfway—no, make that all the way across the Valley to their peaceful, lovely house beneath the White Tank Mountains, where we enjoyed good company, idle talk, and several restful hours. Good thing to do.

Go to church, volunteer, invite friends over, go to a movie with someone new: find ways to be around people who have something else to talk about but your troubles.

4. Exercise

Take the dog for a walk. If you don’t have a dog, go for a walk with a neighbor, a friend, or all by your self. Learn some basic yoga and do a half-hour yoga routine in the mornings and evenings. Join a gym, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Join a softball team. Play some tennis or golf. Run!

5. Get off the caffeine and the booze.

It’s amazing how much caffeine wires you up. We tend to be unaware of this until we shuck off the stuff and notice the difference in the way we feel. Review what you drink and eat (some chocolates contain caffeine), and change your habits to get rid of the sources of caffeine. This includes soft drinks and tea as well as coffee; decaf, BTW, is not completely free of caffeine. Substitute juices, uncaffeinated soft drinks (read the label!), water, herbal teas. 

Kicking a caffeine habit can give you a roaring headache. Try to ease your way around this by switching from coffee and colas to tea for a few days, and then from tea to uncaffeinated drinks.

I find I sleep better after I’ve quit drinking my favorite potable, French-press espresso-roast coffee.

Alcohol has a kick-back effect that can keep you awake. Don’t have a nightcap or a glass of wine thinking it will help you sleep through the night! Because it’s a depressant, alcohol may make you feel like dozing off at first. But a few hours later—along about one or two in the morning—it’s likely to set off that old internal alarm clock. So when you’re feeling too stressed to sleep, get yourself off that stuff, too.

Do indulge yourself in something else: good food. Fix your favorite comfort food; prepare a fine meal; if you can afford it, go out to eat. The better you eat, the better you’ll feel.

There are many other strategies, of course, such as meditation, prayer, and mindful relaxation during panic attacks. If things are really complicated, it helps to brainstorm a list of everything that could possibly be bugging you, assess the results to decide which are important and which really are nothing to worry about, and then write up a strategy for dealing with each of the real issues in a meaningful way. One at a time.

The Magic Touch: Gadgetry review

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Don’t believe in witches, do you? Well, consider this: I have an uncanny ability to control manufacturing and retailing decisions. If I like something, be it food, clothing, household items, tools, whatever, the fact of my liking it will instantly cause it to be taken off the market. Truth!

Case in point: broom-vacs. Recognize the yellow number on the right here?

EurekaVacuums

That’s an old Eureka “Boss” Model 169, a handy-dandy little plug-in vacuum that is the single best gadget ever made for vacuuming tile floors, of which I have 1,860 square feet. This device has both a decent vacuum motor and a rotor brush. It’s death on dust and dog hair. It schleps up fur without blowing it into the air, as a regular-sized vacuum cleaner invariably does. Even when the dog dunes are cornered behind the bedroom door, it grabs the hair rather than sending it airborne.

But it’s getting old: far as I can tell, you no longer can buy a filter for it. More to the point, the cleaning ladies broke its handle, so now it’s wired together with bag ties. These periodically break, dropping the machine on my foot.

Wanna buy a new one? Can’t. Eureka sensed that I wanted it, so they got rid of it.

New broom-vacs are all cordless. Know how long a cordless appliance holds a charge? Me neither, but I figure it’s not long enough to de-dust and de-dog hair 1,860 square feet of hard flooring. Nor am I interested in yet another power vampire. A Roomba has to be kept plugged into the charger at all times. Unplug it, and within a couple of days it loses its charge; recharging takes several hours. Convenient!

So, having loved the Eureka Boss out of existence, I went in search of a broom-vac with a cord. No one carries them. Not Target. Not Costco. Not Best Buy. Not Sears. Not Penny’s. Not Fry’s Electronics… But lo! one day I spotted the teal model above at a WalMart. It’s a Eureka, and it plugs in. Price was only $20, so…why not?

Well, lemme tell you why not: you get what you pay for.

This thing, a Eureka 4-in-1, is a bona fide piece of junk. It has no rotor brush, it has all the pick-up power of a light spring breeze, and it makes such a racket it terrorized the dog out of the house. Its cord is so ludicrously short you can’t even vacuum one room without an extension cord; to do two rooms, you have to link together a chain of cords. In theory, it’s a clever invention: with a little dismantling, it doubles as a hand vacuum, and it even has a plastic attachment for the purpose. Trouble is, it doesn’t vacuum worth a darn in either mode.

Moving on…  A couple of days ago, I reconsidered Costco’s offerings. Decided to try a Shark Cordless VX3 Floor Cleaner, since pretty clearly I’m never going to find a decent corded model. This is an interesting little gadget:

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Like the Roomba Dirt Dawg, it’s not a vacuum cleaner. It’s a battery-powered broom. It looks very much like one of those old-fashioned carpet sweepers that women of a certain age can remember from childhood. Back in the Cretaceous, my mother had one of these: it worked pretty well (for the times: certainly no worse than the hated Electrolux!) and it was blessedly quiet.

dcp_2459Flip this thing over and you find a pair of floor brushes, one that rotates around a long axle and one that spins along the right-hand side, supposedly to pick up dirt near the floorboards. Instead of operating by friction, as the old sweepers used to do, the Shark is driven by a rechargeable Ni-Cad battery that allegedly lasts 50 minutes, long enough to sweep the whole house. Dirt is swept—not vacuumed—into a spacious container in the machine’s head.  A release lever on the handle is supposed to flip this container open so you can shake the dirt out into a trash can without having to touch it or breathe in the dust. Cost is about $50, cheaper than most vacuum cleaners.  

After charging the battery the requisite 20 hours (!), I tried it on the floors yesterday. No problem going over every room in the house on one charge—it still seems to have plenty of juice. The “low” setting, intended for hard floors, pulls less power out of the battery but leaves something to be desired. I ran it on “high” for the entire job. 

Overall, it worked pretty well. My only gripe is that because it has no vacuum feature, its brushes must run directly over debris and dog hair to pick up. This means that to clean along a wall, you have to turn it so that its right-hand edge, bearing the little spinning brush, runs flush against the wall or floorboard. This can elicit some interesting contortions from the user. Oh, and the dustbin release doesn’t work: you have to manually open the bin’s flap and fish out the dog hair and dirt with your fingers, a messy and annoying task.

Compared to other power cleaning gadgets, it ran quietly. It picked up the dirt and fur effectively, and its charge lasted amply long. To test the job it did, I attached a microfiber rag to a Swiffer head and ran it over all the floors. This is a step I have to use after any vacuuming, whether with the big Panasonic or a lightweight broom-vac. On inspection, the rag was no dirtier than it would have been after cleaning with the Eureka Boss or the Panasonic.

So, overall: I’d really like another Eureka Boss 169. But failing that, the Shark VX3 is good enough for government work. Avoid the Eureka 4-in-1, though.

Vendor Chutzpah: Leslie’s loses customer

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apr13pool1Here’s a smart move: when 8 to 10 percent of your customer base is out of work, raise your service prices through the roof. And, with gasoline prices under $2.00 a gallon, tack on an exorbitant “trip surcharge.”

That’s exactly what Leslie’s Swimming Pool Service, a national organization, is up to. Apparently management at headquarters has slipped its communal trolley!

Every year as the weather warms (and again at the beginning of winter), I get a routine clean-out of the pool’s diatomaceous earth filter. It’s no job for rocket scientists: all you do is take the shell apart, lift out the innards, haul them out to the alley, drag a hose out there, and wash out all the old used-up DE. Then you put the thing back together and recharge it with another eight pounds of DE. Really, it’s a happy handyman task. Unfortunately, I’m a handyperson and don’t have the physical strength required to drag the heavy stuff around. So I’ve always hired Leslie’s, which last year charged $85 for the privilege.

This year I call and discover they’ve jacked up the price to around $100, and on top of that they’re adding a “trip charge,” bringing the price of a pretty easy, very ordinary job to around $115. 

So I told the dispatcher I’d schedule the guy for next week, but said I would have to look for someone who would do the job for a more affordable price. OK, said she, assuring me Leslie’s is rock-bottom.

Right.

Cassie and I walk past a house whose occupant parks his pool-service truck in the driveway. This afternoon, I rang the doorbell, introduced myself to him, his wife, and their three children, and learned that he’d be only toooo happy to do the job for $85. 

He came by a few hours later and did an excellent job, no different from what Bob the Leslie’s Guy always does (Yes: I do watch them). 

What would possess a company to ratchet up their prices when their customers are being laid off right and left? And then add insult to injury with a “trip charge,” when gas prices are barely out of the basement? 

Let’s hope Leslie’s doesn’t ask for a taxpayer bailout, too. 

😀

Early Social Security: A way around the earnings limit

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Social Security allows you to start receiving benefits at one of three ages: at 62, at about 65, or at 70. The longer you delay the more you appear to be earning. This results from an actuarial calculation. A flat amount is designated for each American who reaches old age; the older you are when you start collecting, the more you receive monthly—the reasonable assumption being that the older you are, the fewer years you will have to receive your designated cache of dollars.

About three-fourths of Americans start their benefits “early,” at age 62. Many can do so because they have enough savings to live on, or are close enough that a small Social Security payment will get them out of the salt mine. Others are faced with life circumstances, such as layoffs or sickness, that force them to take the money early. And because the government has been slowly pushing back the age of so-called “full” retirement, for many of us that age comes well past the time we feel we should no longer have to work. In my case, “full” retirement doesn’t come until age 66.

If you take so-called “early” retirement—that is, you choose to start drawing benefits at 62—you get a reduced amount. If you wait until age 70, you get a significantly larger benefit. For example, in my case the difference between starting Social Security now and waiting until age 70 would amount to $1,029 a month. The difference if I waited until age 66 would be about $300 a month…enough to ensure that I wouldn’t have to teach one (count it, one) of six freshman comp courses a year to survive.

To discourage people from drawing their benefits at the earliest possible age, Social Security penalizes you for working. Until you reach “full” retirement age, every two dollars you earn above $14,160 results in a dollar confiscated from your benefits. A w4 estimator can help do the math for you. Since neither my $13,944 Social Security benefit (gross: after-tax would be around $11,400) or a gross of $14,160 is enough to live on, this represents a very big problem. Given the ambient ageism that infests American society plus the practical problems entailed in hiring older workers, the likelihood that I will get a full-time job at 64 is almost nil. So I’m faced with two years of poverty (or having to draw down 7 or 8 percent of savings!) before I can start earning enough to live on, and by then my sources of freelance income will have dried up..

As it develops, however, there’s a work-around for the self-employed. It’s called incorporation. The proceeds of an S-corporation do not register for Social Security purposes. This is not true for a C-corp. Here’s how my tax lawyer explains it:

An S corporation is a pass-through entity whose income is taxed directly to the shareholders. In that respect it is like a partnership. The difference, however, is that S corporation income is not subject to self-employment tax (as it would be in a partnership or Schedule C (sole proprietor)). Therefore, S corporation income is not considered to be “earnings” for Social Security purposes.

 

However, as a more-than-5% owner of an S corporation, if you are also an officer (which you would be), you are required to take “reasonable compensation” (W-2 wages) for your duties as an officer of the corporation. Right now, it is the only way IRS can assess FICA/Medicare in an S corporation. If you do not take reasonable salary, IRS will attempt to assess FICA/Medicare on your total withdrawals (and perhaps the total income) of the S corporation. They will assess whatever they can get away with. The reasonableness of the salary depends on the total income of the corporation.

In other words, you can have self-employed income flow into an S-corporation and then have the corporation pay you in salary and dividends. Not only do you get around the $14,600 earnings limitation, you don’t have to pay the usual double dose of FICA levied on self-employed workers.

So, the solution is to form an S-corp that will function as an umbrella for the several sources of freelance income that trickle into my bank account: The Copyeditor’s Desk, HW&E (my original freelance entity, separate from the partnership with Tina), and Funny about Money. None of these will earn much, but taken together the proceeds could at least cut down the number of freshman comp courses I’ll have to teach. That will improve the quality of my life by several orders of magnitude.

A person who runs a business that makes a decent income could profit nicely from this strategy.