Coffee heat rising

Single-handedly rescuing the economy

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Yesterday M’hijito and I went out and spent enough to bring the entire global economy back to life. Well…at least to revive the value of Lowe’s stock.

The Investment House that I so recently was fretting about has needed decent window coverings since we bought it. The previous owner, who rented the place out, had installed cheesy plastic miniblinds in all the windows. In the south-facing front windows, they not only do nothing to block the heat from the summer sun, they seem to assist it in radiating into the house.

M’hijito has long wanted wood blinds, set inside the casements. We checked out the faux wood and found the price is about the same, so we ordered up some real ones that roughly match the color of the salvaged French doors that now form the visual and design centerpiece of the front rooms.

They should look pretty nice, and I think they’ll help a bit with insulating the windows (we really can’t afford to replace the windows with double-paned numbers; certainly not in a style that wouldn’t compromise the house’s historic character). Since we installed a high-efficiency air conditioner and packed the attic with insulation, we’re hoping this will help to drop the gents’ power bills into the almost-reasonable range this summer. Hope so: the price was bracing.

Could we stop at dropping 8 1/2 bills on the decor? Hell, no!

dcp_2420From the window-covering department, it was off to the nursery, where M’hijito unburdened himself of a nice slab of his annual bonus and I continued to get rid of my tax refund. He bought more stuff for his elaborate vegetable garden project, and I found this incredible echeverria with blossoms that look like gold lilies-of-the-valley.

Naturally, I had to have a pot for it. Right? A crackle-glazed pot from China. Of course.

And naturally oneecheverriacalls for anotherecheverria, so of course I had to buy an elegant but less floral hen & chick. And it needed a pot, too. Naturally. And some dirt to fill the pots.

None of these were especially expensive, but they add up.

March is a dangerous time for the gardening Arizonan. The temptation to buy plants is well-nigh overwhelming, partly because the weather beckons you outdoors and partly because any plants you’ve already got are rewarding you with astonishing frenzies of bloom. Check out this thing, which apparently is a freesia:

dcp_2402

Do I recall planting it? Nooo…. It must have been one of those extraneous bulbs that I stuck in every pot and flowerbed I could think of. A few weeks ago I found it sprouting in a dried-out pot I’d stashed in the pot shelves behind the shed on the side of the house. Dragged it into the backyard where it could get some water, and voilà! Who’d’ve thunk it?

The atmosphere is so heavily perfumed with citrus and jasmine that in the evenings you can smell it inside the house with the doors and windows closed. The lime has so many blossoms it looks like it’s been snowed on. The roses have run amok. The cassia are still covered with brilliant yellow flowers. And it is not possible to resist gardening.

Future bumper crop of limes
Future bumper crop of limes

Think I’ll name that gorgeous echeverria Michelle Obama… The other one can be Barack.
😉

What’s that light at the end of the tunnel?

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Earlier this week I spoke with Audra, the loan origination officer at the credit union who helped us refinance the so-called Investment {snark!} House at a very favorable rate. Called her because I’m beginning to feel a little frantic about the drop in value in that neighborhood, and because M’Hijito, who presently occupies the place with a roommate, has expressed interest in going to graduate school in another city.

Our Realtor came up with an estimate of the house’s current price, which I will not repeat here because M’Hijito reads this blog now and again. If he knew what the guy said, he’d keel right over and we’d be sending him to Bottimer’s Funeral Home instead of graduate school. Realtor Dude thinks we could rent it for about $300 a month less than the mortgage payments, which would be OK, I think, because that amount would post as a loss on our income tax. So I expect we would survive. At any rate, these are among those factoids that grow horns at night and flutter out of the Night Closet to haunt your moments of insomnia.

Audra said their appraisers’ experience is showing that homeowners who can hang onto a property for a while should not worry about comparables based on large numbers of nearby foreclosures. That in fact is exactly the situation: the bank-owned house directly behind ours is on the market for a handful of peanuts, and a house on the corner has been in foreclosure twice since we bought our place. La Maya and La Bethulia bought a doll of a house for their nieces a block away and paid under $200,000 for it. Audra reported that when a cluster of foreclosures occurs, property valuations based on comparables start to creep back up about nine months after the last foreclosure sale closes.

She added that she’s confident centrally located real estate, especially houses located fairly close to the new light-rail line, will increase in value. She believes the house will recover its value within five years, although she agreed it’s unlikely our losses in the stock market will recover in that time frame. She thinks real estate, especially in-town real estate in reasonably healthy neighborhoods, will recover faster than we pessimists expect.

Wait, she said, about nine months before believing any Realtor’s estimate of the house’s value.

Hope she’s right! It’s true that the value of my house, which cost about the same as the Investment House, is still higher than what I paid for it. Despite the foreclosure of the house across the street, we’ve had many fewer repossessions here than in M’Hijito’s neighborhood.

Meanwhile, though, she said that the credit union did not yet have guidelines for how to deal with the economic recovery legislation, but that she would call when she finds out anything. And she advised that if either of us loses our job, we should call her immediately and the credit union will make temporary changes in the loan terms so that we can hang onto the house.

Well… Since the kid is running a bit late in his graduate school applications and so probably can’t start a credible program in the fall, nine months would just about work out: we’ll have a better grasp of where we stand, and if he wants to go to Tucson, by then maybe unemployment will have dropped enough that people can afford to come up with the security deposits and rent payments we’ll need to extract. It’s an awfully cute house in a very convenient neighborhood, and so I expect we’d do OK renting it.
***

Speaking of the foreclosure of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, yesterday a Sears delivery truck pulled up in front of the place. What should be trundled out but a VAST, expensive-looking, stainless-steel side-by-side refrigerator.

This I take as proof positive that the new owners intend to live there and not rent the place out to another Biker Boob. BB’s absentee landlord tricked that house out with the cheapest, chintziest appliances he could get his hands on, as most of the the real estate “investors” around here do.

The former junk-heap is still vacant, but the owners are keeping it maintained—nary a weed in sight, and all the trees and ornamentals are green and happy.

More on unemployment insurance ripoffs

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Remember that I mentioned the Unemployment Insurance representative told us, during the 90-minute chivaree in which all us furloughed Great Desert University employees were to sign up for the Shared Work program, that we should be careful of the various “fees and penalties” Chase Bank was likely to charge against the required debit card we would be given? Well, the guy wasn’t kidding.

CNN runs an article today detailing exactly how many gouges the banks are digging out of Americans’ unemployment benefits: 40 cents for the privilege of asking how much remains in your balance; 50 cents if they deny your card; 35 cents to access your account by phone. According to this report, ripoffs range from around 40 cents to as much as $3 per transaction.

These, we may note, are being coughed up to the very institutions whose executives are using the taxpayers’ TARP money to frolic in fancy resorts and fly around the country in private jets.

Oh, yeah, speaking of gouges: you get to pay income taxes on your unemployment insurance, too.

Talk about a Nation of Sheep. I can’t believe we’re not at the barricades!

The William E. Morris Institute, a nonprofit that represents low-income people in court pro bono, is spearheading a class-action suit against Arizona’s Department of Economic Services, which administers Unemployment Insurance disbursements here (after a fashion). The complaint is that DES isn’t processing claims fast enough—or, in some cases, at all. That’s not surprising, given the agency’s antediluvian operations.

It’s good to hear that someone, somewhere, is trying to put these clowns’ feet to the fire. What’s amazing, to my mind, is that we don’t have riots in the streets. But I guess as long as we can afford our cable bill, we can keep sucking on our pacifier. What, us worry?

What’s “groceries,” anyway?

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How do you account for your spending at emporiums that sell household and personal care items as well as food? In the past, I’ve let Quicken record any charge that occurred at, say, a Safeway or an Albertson’s as “groceries.” But the truth is, a substantial part of what you buy there isn’t groceries at all—it’s household gear, personal care products, or even yard-care items.

When I bought a freezer and started the great Food Hoarding Project a few weeks ago, I decided to break these things out, so that I could see what portion of my spending is really going to food and what to household and other items. It occurred to me that this might explain how some punkin’s can report spending $200 a month (or even more spectacularly parsimonious figures) on groceries for a family of four: maybe what they’re classifying as “groceries” is food and food alone.

Yesterday I made another run on Sprouts, Costco, Target, and Safeway, pretty well making my goal of storing about three months’ worth of food and household supplies. Except for a few perishable items, I now have enough meat, vegetables, cheese, beans, rice, sugar, flour, cornmeal, pasta (& cetera) to last for a good three months, stored up against the specter of catastrophic inflation or, more realistically, of a layoff. From here on in, it shouldn’t take much to keep this store up to date, and I believe I can do that in no more than one or two trips to the markets each month.

The total amount I’ve spent on groceries (bear in mind that I was almost out of everything when I started) is $519.36. That prorates out to $173.12 a month: an all-time record low for me. Especially when you realize I don’t break out pet food, what with Cassie the Corgi dining on human food.

But maybe not so record-breaking, because cleaning products, shampoo, contact lens stuff, Bandaids, and the like previously counted as “groceries.”

Since the start of the Hoarding Project, total spending on household and personal care goods has been $151.80, which would work out to $50.60 for each of the next three months. That’s not bad either, in my universe: a total of $223.72 ($173.12 + $50.60) is still significantly less than I ordinarily have spent per month in that lumped-together “groceries” category.

But…we have to bear in mind that while I was almost out of food when I started this scheme, I had plenty of household goods: lifetime supplies of Simple Green, paper towels, toilet paper, and the like. This month’s “household” category was inflated because my ancient Brita water filter gadget broke, because I dropped my indispensable little kitchen timer on the floor and broke that, and because I decided to buy a lifetime supply of Costco’s tinfoil at a very good per-unit price but a breathtaking out-of-pocket price. If I hadn’t purchased those items, the total for “household goods” would be much lower. But in either event, the total we have is unrealistic, because I avoided buying stuff I would normally need to stock up on and because I bought items that I would normally purchase once every few years, not once every few weeks or months.

IMHO, it’s a little more enlightening to be able to see how much is actually spent on food, as opposed to everything that’s spent at a particular type of merchant. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, though.

So, out of curiosity: how does your accounting system register “groceries”? Do you break out supermarket and big-box purchases into categories such as “food,” “household items,” “personal care items,” and the like? Or do you lump everything that appears on a supermarket receipt into one category?

Slow Money: Countercultural thinker may have something…or not

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I stumbled across Woody Tasch on NPR yesterday afternoon, when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a segment on his “slow money” concept, as it applies to a small organic dairy farm in upstate New York. It’s basically a variant onpeer-to-peer lending, or disintermediation, which cuts out the lending institutions with which we are presently feeling disgruntled.

The idea has a certain postmodern (or Depression-era?) charm. Like small-town bankers, we will all lend money to our friends and townspeople, here in the global village. Tasch’s take on it, however, is intriguing: that the speed with which financial transactions fly around the planet is a weakness in the global economy, because there are “structural limits to the power of industrial finance.”Speaking in favor of a simplified market, Tasch observes that “most recently, the subprime mortgage collapse signals the limits of ever accelerating, ever more complex, derivative-driven financial markets.”

He argues that the make-big-money-fast model, organized from “‘markets down’ rather than from the ‘ground up,'” works in favor of environmental degradation and, where food is concerned, brings us chemical-laden food, obesity, and hunger. Tasch focuses on socially responsible food production, suggesting that capital should be steered toward small, local, environmentally friendly farms and businesses.

It would be good to see organized support of farms that produce high-quality food all over the country. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have access to this kind of dairy product at a nearby market? Assuming, however, it came at a price one could afford…

Possibly if more financial support materializes for operations that produce organic foods, milk from grass-fed cows will become available at something less than $20 a gallon.
😉

Life in the Big City

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Dang! Now I’m stuck in the house for an hour or so.

Burglar tools, 1875
Burglar tools, 1875

Thanks to a seemingly endless stream of missives from the neighborhood association warning of burglars who wait and watch on the street and then clean out your house when they see you leave on an errand, I’ve been checking all around before I drive my car out of the garage. At one point, our intrepid leader reported seven burglaries and prowlers caught in the act over a 15-day period—one every two days. Many of the perps arrive in pairs or groups; pretty clearly, some of this stuff represents organized gang activity. Others are singletons. The level of their determination to rip off the residents keeps step with the rise in the unemployment rate:

Neighbors,

 

I’ve received several emails and calls about an incident that occurred in the 8000 block of N 8th Ave today.

 

A 20-30 yr old Caucasian male approached two homes that we know of in the middle of the day. After ringing the doorbell and pounding loudly on the door but getting no answer, he attempted to drill thru the lock and pry open one of the doors. The homeowner was home but wisely chose not to answer the door for the stranger. When it became apparent he was attempting to break in, the homeowner yelled at the guy and he left.

 

I’m happy that he left and did not get into the house, but he’s still out there. Phoenix PD was called but the guy was long gone. They indicated they were aware of this guy and have been looking for him. We need to be especially watchful for this creep as it could be very dangerous if he gets into a house where the homeowners are home as he almost did today. If you see someone matching this description, call 911 immediately. You do not need to wait for him to do something. If he matches this description, call 911 immediately. If the dispatcher gives you any grief about it, tell them we’ve been told the police are looking for this guy and our Community Action Officer has asked us to call immediately.

 

The guy is 20-30 years old, white, about 5-10″, shaved head, dark, tightly trimmed goatee. His face was described as gaunt as you might expect a drug addict to appear. He arrived at the house on a red and black motorcycle, wearing a Yamaha motorcycle jacket and a helmet , carrying a backpack.

 

Be watchful, be safe, be quick.

{sigh}

Okayyy… Just a few minutes ago I gathered my junk to make a run on Costco, Sprouts, and Target. And what should I see parked about three doors down but an old beige Oldsmobile with someone sitting in the driver’s seat. Just a-sittin’ there, minding their own business, eh? Because I couldn’t see far enough to get the license plate from my front yard, I drove my van down there, wrote down the license number and car description, and then came back. The occupant had a shirt hung in the driver’s side window so I couldn’t get a good look at her. (Some of the perps of late have been women, BTW.) I wasn’t even sure it was a woman or a man in drag—the hairdo looked like a bad wig. It could have been a guy tricked out to look like a woman, by way of camouflage.

Damn it. I had a lot of stuff to do today, and I didn’t have in mind spending an hour or so waiting around for a cop to show up. That’s the usual wait time when you call 911 around here. Ohhh well.

In the protective coloration department, yesterday I realized that if I’m to continue shopping at the Sprouts, Costco, and Target in my general area, I shouldn’t be doddering around the parking lots with a purse slung over my shoulder. Since I charge everything, really there’s no reason to haul a bag around everyplace I go.

For a little old lady to carry a purse into the Sprouts or the Albertson’s shopping center down the street is like wearing a sign saying “Mug Me!” The Albertson’s is just creepy—I won’t go in there even in the daytime anymore. Sprouts’s parking lot is a bit sketchy, too. The Walgreen’s in that strip mall allows young toughs to loiter outside the front door, so when you go in there you have to run a gauntlet of threatening-looking men and boys, and you get to enjoy passing through a thick cloud of their cigarette smoke. They may be harmless fellows, but IMHO if you dress like a violent thug and affect the mannerisms of a violent thug, there’s a fair chance you are a violent thug.

La Maya had a close escape from a mugger at the gas station adjacent to the Sprouts parking lot, and then, more recently, she watched a hooker pick up a john in the parking lot. So, your choices are to burn gas driving into a better area, where the stores are nicer and the parking lots less littered with questionable patrons, or to take your chances closer to home.

dcp_23971So, realizing that when I shop I rarely use anything other than a credit card, I decided to disinter an old fold-over wallet and use it to carry the AMEX card, driver’s license, and Safeway nuisance card. It will fit in my jeans pocket, and as long as I’m wearing a shirt on the outside, the resulting bulge is unnoticeable. With any luck, the perps will prefer to knock over some other little old lady with her purse slung over her shoulder, and maybe leave me alone.

And besides, it has a benefit: one fewer piece of junk to drag around.

Of course, leaving my purse in the house poses the chance that it will be stolen, if indeed The Burgular decides to come visiting. But I have a weird little hidey-hole that is SO strange I doubt even a pro will think of it. So I’m going to hide the purse there whenever I go out.

Image: Burglar’s Tools Found in the Bank, Wikipedia Commons