This morning I accidentally concocted a scrumptious little drinkie-poo…
When I went to whip up my favorite morning drink, I found the vanilla had run out. Ordinarily this beloved swiggle consists of orange juice blended with a handful of frozen fruit and flavored with a dash of vanilla. Lately I’ve been using Costco’s mixed fruit, which includes mangos, papaya, strawberries, and pineapple.
Hmmm… No vanilla, but in the cabinet right above the pantry, what should I have but a nice bottle of Maker’s Mark. So I dribbled a few drops into the blender container—no more than a teaspoonful—and kerBUZZZZ! Whapped it up into a nice cold fruit juice smoothie.
Holy mackerel. This is not your mother’s vanilla substitute!The effect was absolutely delicious.
I think you could adapt it to make a very fine juice-based cocktail: use a jigger of bourbon instead of a few drops.
For hevvinsake be careful, though. The stuff is so seductively tasty your guests could easily overindulge and end up face-down on the living-room floor. And obviously, it’s not for the kiddies, even with just a dribble of bourbon in it.
I think we should call this drink The English Major.
For one English Major, you need:
A glassful of orange juice (about 8 or 10 ounces)
A few pieces of cut-up fresh or frozen fruit (1/4 to 1/3 cup)
Bourbon (or possibly rum?) to taste
Blender or submersible blender
Purée the ingredients together and serve neat. Using frozen fruit gives you a very cold drink; with fresh fruit, you might want to serve it over ice.
Daytime temps are still in the nineties and hundreds here in lovely downtown Phoenix, but evenings and mornings are delightfully cool. It’s time to get ready for winter gardening, lhudly sing huzzah!
Accordingly, I spent large swaths of Friday and Saturday pulling out dead plants (quite a few fricasseed during this summer’s unrelenting heat) and then digging compost into the flowerbed by the pool. The only two survivors there are a venerable thyme plant and the rose. A blue plumbago volunteered just on the other side of the planter’s border, and since it’s a pretty plant, I’ve let it grow. It made it through the summer, singed but unbowed. To some degree, it may have protected the rose by growing into and over it. I had to cut back a fair amount of plumbago to disentangle the rose plant.
For this fall, I decided to dispense with most of the pots. The whole idea of gardening in pots has morphed into a gigantic hassle, one that had me dragging water hoses around a third of an acre every single day, allllll summer long! Enough with that! I’m going to keep one pot for some bush peas, but otherwise, no more misguided efforts to grow vegetables in pots.
The magnificent, hardy Swiss chard I grew last winter, which didn’t bolt to seed until well after the hot weather arrived, was an heirloom variety that I’d picked up on a whim at Whole Foods. It’s way up there among the most successful veggie crops I’ve every tried to grow. So, as unlikely as Whole Foods seems as a gardening supply shop, I decided to drive back up there in search of more chard seeds and this time to look more seriously at their offerings.
They had a lot of interesting seeds. Some of the most intriguing were sold out. Fortunately, I did manage to find the beloved chard and so bought a couple of packets. I found some red romaine, which looks very pretty but which may be frost-sensitive. We’ll find out, come December. They also had some radicchio, which I enjoy but usually can’t afford at the grocery store.
The peas are an heirloom variety. The packet says they need no staking and that you’re supposed to plant them two inches apart…and “do not thin.” That’s rather amazing. Because the planting bed is so tiny and the soil isn’t very good, my plan is to salvage one of the large pots from this summer’s failed experiment, put it next to the poolside bed where I can easily reach it with the hose, and use that for the peas. And probably put a few seeds in the ground, too.
There’s still so much gravel in that flowerbed that I decided to forego the root crops this year. Much as I enjoy beets (especially) and carrots, the dirt is so rocky and poor they just don’t grow very well. And they don’t seem to like growing in pots, either. Every time I try to cultivate that garden, I dig out more of the damned stones that Satan and Proserpine dumped in there, but every year more of them work their way to the surface. Leafy plants seem to do OK there, but anything that needs to grow plump underground…forget it!
Much work remains to be done. I need to find a way to prop up the Meyer lemon’s limbs, which once again are so laden with fruit they bend to the ground. Realized this could be done with lashed-together tripods made of wood scraps; this will require me to disassemble an aging trellis and saw the sticks to size. Good exercise…
Then I need to get rid of the two roses that have never thrived in their place on the north side of the backyard wall. It’s too shady there for them in the winter and too hot in the summer. A hibiscus presently occupying a pot can go there…one more pot disappeared!
Yes. The pots are going to get gone. The little westside deck is overrun with potted plants, all of which also have to be watered every single day, all summer long. What I think I’d like to do is make a single arrangement around one especially nice plant, sort of a set piece, and then get rid of all the rest of them. Same for the tangle of plants outside the back door.
That’s not all that needs to exit.
Then I’ve got to get an arborist in here. The trees in front have run amok, despite my determination not to put much water on the xeric numbers. They need to be pruned by someone who knows what he’s doing. Most of the yard guys want to turn them into basketballs, which ruins them.
The big palo brea, in its drive to take over the planet, has become a menace to navigation. Some woman showed up at my door a few weeks ago offering to trim it herself and drag the cuttings into the alley. She said her dog had pulled her into the thorny overhanging brush and scratched up her face. So I had to get Gerardo to try to cut it back, in the process of which he gouged off a big limb and left a huge open wound on the even bigger limb to which it was attached. I’m sure it’s weakened that part of the tree, leaving about a quarter of the canopy vulnerable to snapping off in next summer’s monsoon winds.
Even though it’s a beautiful tree, I may have to have it removed. In the effort to build a screen between my front window and Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, Richard (landscaper) planted way too many trees and bushes that have grown way too large. Inside the courtyard, the Swan Hill olive tree has now grown plenty big enough to suffice for a frontyard specimen tree. Without the palo brea, the huge vitex could fill out better and be just fine for the area outside the wall. It makes beautiful blue flowers, and it has no thorns with which to take out the eyes of passing dog walkers.
Richard said he would remove the dead ash tree at large expense, but so far no sign of the guy. He wants a thousand bucks to do that and relandscape the area that will be destroyed by the loss of the tree. I really can’t afford that at this juncture, but neither can I leave a dead tree snag out there. Besides looking awful, sooner or later it’s likely to break and fall onto the house. If the neighbors don’t get the city after me first.
So these projects are really going to eat into my survival fund, damn it. I don’t know what I can do myself, though. The pruning is a bigger job than I can even begin to do, and the front is hideously overgrown. I can’t afford a lawsuit from some passerby who gets poked in the face by that palo brea, nor the increase in homeowner’s insurance if the dead ash tree breaks off and trashes the house. Ugh! The joys of homeownership.
Well… If I sold the house I’d net about $250,000 (if I’m lucky…one of La Maya’s neighbors has put his house on the market for about $100 a square foot, which would depress the sale value of my house to about $186,000—or less, since she’s in a higher-priced part of the neighborhood). Investing $250,000 and taking a 4 percent drawdown would give me a munificent $833 a month to cover rent payments. And that sure wouldn’t buy much! Eight hundred bucks will buy you a hole in a rabbit warren around here, so solidly built that you can hear the upstairs neighbor widdle every time he goes to the bathroom. Amazingly, apartment buildings around here don’t even have fire walls—recently a fire started in one upscale Scottsdale rabbit hutch and gutted eight adjoining apartments.
Probably having the palo brea removed, as painful as that would be, is the better part of valor: one fewer thing to have to take care of. The vitex can run amok without doing much harm, and with just the olive, the desert willow, the Texas ebony, the two weeping acacias, and the paloverde to get pruned… Uhm… “Just”? How on earth am I ever going to afford to live in this place without a $65,000 income? Social Security just isn’t going to cut it. LOL! Literally!!
Ohh well. At least this winter the backyard will be full of oranges and lemons, and there’ll be so much chard by the pool I won’t have to buy groceries.
In a moment of idleness, I decided to Stumble in search of sites that might interest friends of Funny about Money. Below, 25 sites full of information, leads, and tools for personal finance enthusiasts. Prepare to bookmark!
Find Help, Get Action:
Hard-to-find 800 numbers. Includes Amazon, Google(!!), Dell, Apple. Some entries give a clue to how to reach a human.
Consumer Action. Free hotline refers consumers to complaint-handling agencies through our free hotline. This nonprofit publishes multilingual educational materials; compares prices on credit cards, bank accounts and long-distance services; advocates for consumers.
Federal Reserve Consumer Help. Contact the Federal Reserve if you’re having a problem with a bank or other financial institution.
General Consumer Information
Lifehacker. The Magic 8-Ball of interesting, useful, and amazing stuff
Federal Citizen Information Center: a gold mine of information. Click “Employment” to check out “how to get a job in the federal government.”
FRB Consumer Information. Another Federal Reserve Board page: banking, credit, mortgages, personal finance, leasing, identity theft. Useful information.
Consumer Reports on privacy. What information is being collected about you, why you need to know, and what (if anything) you can do about it. Did you know there’s a database tracking your record of returned merchandise?
Radio frequency identification. Clear, readable, and well researched excerpt from a law review article detailing what this is and how it will affect everyone’s privacy. Even cash transactions will be trackable…right to your doorstep. So much for any ideas about “going off the grid”!
Pest Control
Spambox. Creates a temporary e-mail address for those outfits that demand an e-mail address to “verify” when you need to download or get into a site. It forwards to your real site and then expires after a set time.
Bug Me Not. Shared logins for sites that pester you to register
Annoyance zappers. Plug-ins for zapping many common online annoyances
So M’hijito and his buddy drove to the wealthy northside suburbs halfway to Alaska, there to view the golden retriever said Buddy had heard about. They were pretty excited about the possibility of M’hijito finding the Dawg of His Dreams. He has wanted a dog for a long time but was waiting until the muddy back yard was desert-landscaped and his life was in order so he could care properly for a pet.
What they found was a harassed and weepy woman with a pair of four-year-old twins, a fourteen-year-old daughter, a McMansion way too big for one freshly impoverished divorcée to keep up when she’s not practicing medicine, and two large out-of-control dogs, one the alleged golden and the other something that looked like an American bulldog.
At the outset, M’hijito suspected the “golden” was a mix, probably containing some pit bull. The woman said she had the dog’s papers in a file but couldn’t find them (aren’t you glad she’s not your doctor!). Asked if she had vaccination records, she repeated the story and then said the reason she didn’t have a county rabies tag for the dog was that the dog ate its collar.
Ah. A new variant on “the dog ate my homework.” Good, very good.
Both dogs had been kept outdoors. Period. Neither was house-trained or even allowed inside the house. Neither was obedience-trained. The bulldog, M’hijito said, was completely berserk and hopelessly out of control. The retriever would not come to call, did not heel, and, though friendly and affable, clearly was not socialized to live with humans.
You understand what “never allowed to come inside” means… This summer we had day after day after searing day of 116-degree-plus heat. I would go outside at 10 o’clock at night and find the thermometer on the back porch resting at 100 degrees. Temperatures rarely dropped below 90 at any hour of the day or night between early June and the end of August.
Leaving a domestic dog, particularly one bred to swim in icy lakes, outside in that kind of extreme heat comes under the heading of “abuse.” And then…
Yes. And then the woman admitted that the 14-year-old whose pet this dog was supposed to be sat around the house all summer while her parents put in 12- to 14-hour workdays. The mother would come home in the evening to find the dogs outside with no water, because the kid couldn’t get off her duff long enough to turn on the hose and fill up a dog dish.
Considering that this child was 12 at the time Daddy brought the retriever home for her, I believe we’ve arrived at “criminal neglect.”
M’hijito is convinced that the dog is no purebred golden retriever. He thinks she has some pit bull in her. From the picture, it’s hard to tell. I’d say she’s a golden, but maybe an individual that a breeder would label “pet” quality. She may be the product of a puppy mill.
Something’s not quite right, that’s for sure… She looks too thin for a two-year-old dog—at 18 months, a golden starts to fill out. Her coat’s not great, though some goldens are less furry than others. And that slight crustiness around the eyes doesn’t bode well. Likely she’s showing the stress from two years of neglect that rises to the level of abuse. There’s also the possibility that, having been left outdoors in our dust storms, she’s picked up valley fever. Compare this dog with the ones on the rescue site, and she looks like one of the “before” photos.
At any rate, M’hijito decided to decline the opportunity, and so Buddy took the dog home. Mrs. Buddy was none too thrilled, she being heavily gravid with her own twins and already responsible for two other large dogs. So the dog ended up at M’hijito’s house overnight, while Mr. Buddy worked on Mrs. Buddy. By the following morning she had caved, and so they came by his house to retrieve the retriever.
I’m such a bag lady. Not literally…but I suffer acutely from Bag Lady Syndrome. You can tell me till you’re blue in the face that I have plenty to get by, but I won’t believe it until the bills are paid and no one has carted me off to the poor farm.
Matter of fact, this morning after I’d run another Excel spreadsheet that showed, contrary to the present optimistic theory, an average shortfall in 2010’s enforced “retirement” of $740 a month, my financial adviser was on the phone, cooing in soothing tones, “You’ll be f-i-i-n-e.” Even though I don’t have anything like a million bucks in the bank, he says, there’s more than enough to supplement Social Security and cover all my expenses for about 50 years, at a 4 percent drawdown.
The other day Frugal Scholar, the professor with the penchant for thrift-store shopping, reported a delightful revelation: truth to tell, she and Mr. FS could rent their paid-for house and retire to Costa Rica. Today. Gone fishin’. Once and for all… If they so chose.
Ah hah! Financial independence: freedom to do as you please, absent the chains of debt.
Many of us, I think, assume that to enter that blessed state we need to have stashed enough in savings to make us wealthy by most anyone’s definition: a million bucks or more. But I beg to differ. With a reasonable standard of living and a paid-for roof over your head, you don’t have to be a millionaire to achieve financial independence and maintain a middle-class lifestyle. A much more modest stash can support you, given the right conditions.
The Scholars appear to be situated firmly in the financial middle class. With the exception of university presidents, certain deans, and the occasional patent-holding bioengineer, academics don’t earn much. At least, not in the larger scheme of things—compared, say, to the owner of a carpet-cleaning service, to a doctor or a lawyer, to a basketball player, or to a twenty-something kid on Wall Street. It’s unlikely that even between the two of them they’ve stashed a million bucks in their 403(b) plans. Yet they are financially independent. They could, if they wished, retire today with little or no change of lifestyle (other than moving to a tropical paradise…).
The first key to financial independence is to get out of debt. All debt, including the mortgage. You’ll notice that the Scholars had the initiative and self-discipline to pay off their house. In my own case, I’m especially grateful that I managed to do that a few years ago. Because I don’t have to come up with hundreds of dollars every month to keep a roof over my head, now that I’ve been laid off…hallelujah! I don’t have to get another day job!
And the other key? Come to terms psychologically with living within your means. Though I won’t be enjoying the Queen of Sheba’s lifestyle, neither do I expect to move to the poorhouse. The only real “sacrifice,” if you can call it that, is that I will have to drive my fully functional, very nice nine-year-old Toyota a few more years, rather than trading it in when it reaches the ten-year milepost. I will have to earn a few thousand bucks a year to cover my share of the house M’hijito and I are copurchasing, but that can be done by taking on a couple of easy, part-time teaching gigs. Pay is low, but work is minimal and mildly entertaining.
Debt, particularly mortgage and automobile loans, racks up the largest part of most Americans’ month-to-month costs. Once you no longer have to pay an outrageous slug of interest to keep a roof over your head and wheels under your feet, your ordinary living costs are surprisingly modest.
Financial independence doesn’t necessarily mean not working. After you’ve attained financial independence—that is, your living expenses are low enough that the proceeds from modest savings and other forms of passive income will support you—you’re free to do as you please. If you want to keep working at your job, you can. Or you can take up a more interesting line of work, try to do something less profitable that you’ve always dreamed of doing, or devote your time, energy and skill to altruistic pursuits.
A friend retired from his medical practice with plenty of zing still left. He and his wife spent a year working pro bono at a hospital in New Zealand. Another friend passes his time working for Habitat for Humanity, as does my step-sister. A third decided to become an organist in her old age, an enterprise that led to a wonderful adventure in Australia. With the possible exception of the anesthesiologist and his wife (who by and large live modestly, by Seattle standards), none of these people are wealthy. They live middle-class lifestyles, dwelling in ordinary homes in decent neighborhoods, driving nice-but-not-gaudy cars, staying out of debt, and generally doing as they please…within their means.
In debt on the cards? Or are you contemplating a big purchase and planning to put it on your credit card? Here’s a way to figure out how long it will take to pay off the balance making only the minimum payment each month…and gain some insight into credit-card debt.
Once the calculator has given you the bad news about the minimum-payment strategy, it delivers some more options.
Entering $2,000 as an outstanding debt at 17 percent, I learned it would take 17 years to pay it off, at a rate of $40 a month. By the time the two grand was finally erased from my record, I would have spent $3,181 in interest. So, a swell-elegant $2,000 sofa (for example) would end up costing me $5,181, and the thing would be ready for Goodwill before it was paid for.
Okay, let’s say you can afford payments of more than forty bucks. The results page lets you explore what would happen if you paid more toward principal. Enter $100 a month, and you see you could pay off the card in 24 months, assuming you make no more charges. You’ll pay $369 in interest for the privilege, but at least the sofa will still be standing by the time you’ve paid for it.
You determine to accelerate your debt pay-off plan. How much will you have to pay per month to zero out this card in a year? Enter the number of years you hope it will take you to get rid of the debt, and the monthly payment comes up. Let’s say we want to pay for the sofa in one year: monthly payments would be $183, and in that year $189 in interest would accrue.
Eye-opening, isn’t it?
The extreme joy of deferred purchasing
The moral of the story: some English-major math reveals that if you simply delayed purchasing the sofa until you had $2,000 in the bank, you’d only have to put $166.66 a month aside to be able to buy it in a year.
At $183 a month, you could have the cash to plunk down in 11 months. But if $40 was really all you could afford, then you could buy the sofa outright after just four years.
And it wouldn’t cost you anything in interest. Matter of fact, if you put the swell-elegant sofa fund in a high-interest savings account, your purchase price would earn a few pennies for you. And a penny saved is a penny earned.
