Coffee heat rising

Moments of Fame

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The 183rd Carnival of Personal Finance is online at The Frugal Duchess. Funny’s long-term care article appears in this week’s line-up. LOL! You’ve heard the term”filthy lucre”? It must have been invented by a banker: check out Broke in the Suburb’s tales from the (corner bank’s ) vault!In less lurid realms, I’d noticed Room Farm’s Lessons from the Depression before and was happy to see it in this carnival. In the weird department, check out the strange pitch Squawkfox got from some advertiser. Retire at 40 discusses a topic that has become especially apposite of late: lifestyle deflation. Absolutely do NOT miss The Digerati Life’s 21 Deal Sites and Online Tools to Help You Save Money—I’m bookmarking this page right now!

Retire at 40 has posted the 89th Carnival of Money Stories, where Funny’s first report on the Yard Sale Adventure appears. Here’s something strange: instead of cutting credit availability, American Express actually increased Credit Addict’s limit—by 25 percent! Dough Roller tells how, in a moment of amazing ingenuity, he figured out how to earn $826.75 in ten minutes. The Greenest Dollar discusses the pro’s and cons of paying off your mortgage early. Across the Pond, Find Financial Freedom realizes that buying a rental property could now be a profitable move; don’t know how that would apply in other countries, but note the calculations and try applying them to your own circumstances. And Peter at Bible Money Matters tells of being high-pressured when he went to cancel an old, inactive credit card.

Funny made Editor’s Pick with the squib on saving your pay stuns at this week’s Money Hacks Carnival, hosted by surfer François Viljoen at Liberta. This is a pretty entertaining site by a guy who has freed himself financially and is now volunteering for a South African aid group and…well, surfing a lot. Check out Living Almost Large’s story of diverting her husband from his craving for a new vehicle. At Monevator—another new-to-me site—the Investor offers three ingenious ways to control (or at least defer) spending. Cash Money Life describes how to collect unemployment benefits…and along the way reveals that the average amount states pay is a heckuva lot more than my state pays. Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity lists the annual year-end tax strategies. And, good anytime, Wenchypoo discusses the art of saving big (and small) bucks through negotiation.

Rain!

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Rain in the desert is a wonderful thing, especially these days. This morning we awoke to a steady drizzle that started during the night. The Sonoran Desert has allegedly been suffering drought conditions for almost a decade. In recent years, reservoirs dropped to alarmingly low levels, and some lakes went dry.

Within living memory, we’ve usually seen slow, gentle rains (called “female” rains by the Indians because of that gentle quality) in the winter and hard monsoon (“male”) rains late in the summer. But during the current years-long drought, we’ve had little or no winter rain and precious few monsoons. The monsoons finally returned last summer, and now we’re getting rain in December.

Several Southwestern states engaged in a compact to distribute water from the Colorado River. The calculations for how much would be available and which states should be served first were based on historic rainfall records. And, thanks to the generous allocations of water based on these optimistic figures, development proceeded. Apace.

Until the real estate crash brought a stop to building, Las Vegas and Phoenix were the fastest-growing cities in the nation. At one point, our wise leaders were allowing builders to blade an acre an hour of precious, irreplaceable Sonoran habitat. The result is mile on mile on ugly mile of Southern California-style sprawl, endless acres of Styrofoam-and-plaster houses on postage-stamp lots that now sell—if they sell at all—for pennies on the dollar.

All of which is heartbreaking for those who love the desert and ultimately frustrating for those who invested in real estate.

But a much bigger bust is lurking. Scientific studies have shown that over the long term, the so-called “drought” conditions we’ve seen recently represent the Sonoran desert’s normal climate. In other words, the assumptions upon which the water allocation agreements were made and according to which development was permitted were wrong. When a municipality or state requires that 100 years of water be available if a site is to be developed, the calculation to arrive at that water availability may also be ersatz. No one really knows how much water will be available for how many years. So, there’s a good chance that not enough water exists in the Southwest to support the huge populations being lured into the area. The classic discussion of this issue, which has yet to be beat, is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert.

If I were a young person trying to decide where to build my life in a time of global warming and the political and social unrest likely to accompany it, I would be looking at areas where plenty of water is available. While it’s true you can’t shovel heat, you can’t melt it and drink it, either. The Pacific Northwest, which is relatively unpolluted, reasonably progressive in most areas, and economically active, strikes me as a likely place to start a career and a family. Possibly the Great Lakes region, despite environmental degradation from historic mining and industrial activities, would be a reasonable second choice.

Water will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, globally and in large parts of the United States. A young person with the flexibility to build a life where she or he wishes would be wise to take that fact into consideration.

Seven frugal things to do (or not) when you don’t feel good

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1. Stay away from stores

Feeling under the weather tends to depress one’s mood. We know that people tend to spend more when they feel depressed.

2. Call a friend

There’s nothing like a friend’s voice to make you feel better. Even if it’s just a psychological lift, it’s a lift.

3. Turn off the idiot box

Violence, stupidity, and bad news—the dominant modes of the popular media—make you feel worse, not better.

4. Turn on your favorite music

So much better than violence, stupidity, and bad news…unless, of course, you favor music with those characteristics. 😉

5. Meditate, read a good book, do some quiet yoga, or go to church or temple

These activities are all of a kind. They stabilize most people’s mood.

6. Get something warm and nutritious to eat

There’s a reason chicken soup is called “Jewish penicillin.”

7. After accomplishing at least three of these things, go to bed early

Good night, little chickadees! A domani…

Karma heads south in the afternoon

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Sorta seemed like things were going O.K.

I should’ve known better.

dwmagicLast week when the dishwasher dude came over, to the tune of $70, I whined him into submission by crying about the alleged pending layoff, and so instead of charging me $380 plus parts plus tax to replace the impeller motor, he clued me to his theory that you can sometimes clean out whatever is obstructing the motor by running two or three bottles of Dishwasher Magic through the machine. This miracle elixir can be had at any Ace Hardware for about $4.00.

It seems to have worked, in a desultory way. However, now the dishwasher has decided that it won’t turn off at the end of the wash cycle. When its “countdown” reaches 1 minute, it just keeps on running. Makes its noise, too. It no longer makes the noise anywhere else in the washing process. But it makes it as it struggles unsuccessfully to shut down. To bring a stop to that, I have to enter the “cancel-&-drain” code. Helle’s Belles. We have 10 people slated to descend on my house for Christmas dinner, and so the prospect of letting the problem go until the dishwasher craps out does not appeal.

Because, as you know, this will guarantee that the dishwasher will die at 9:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

So it looks like we’ll be enjoying a $300 or $400 dishwasher repair bill, after all.

A decent night’s sleep—more than 10 hours!—ended a two-week-long spate of insomnia. Nevertheless, I felt tired. Did the laundry. Precious little food in the house: made do with a cheese sandwich and coffee for breakfast.

The pool needed to be backwashed, its pressure having risen from its normal 6 or 8 psi to about 14 psi. It needed other attention, too, as signaled by some green patches of algae. The techs at the pool store claim the growth of algae when the chemicals are correctly balanced indicates that the pool should be drained and refilled, another little operation I can’t afford just now. They suggested that I let the pool pump drain the water as far as possible for several backwashes in a row. So I flooded the alley (illegal! on Sunday, though, the City’s enforcers will be home doing their own weekend chores), creating a model of Lake Superior out there. It took over an hour with the hose running full blast to raise the water line back to normal.

In the interim, I noticed a fine bathtub ring of white calcium all around the tile. So had to get down on hands & knees, with my head hanging upside down over the water, and scrub this stuff off with vinegar and a scouring pad. One 45-minute tour around the perimeter didn’t suffice. Had to do it again. I scrubbed in the icy water until my fingers were numb and my knees wouldn’t hold my weight anymore. Then I brushed the algae off the walls and steps. To accomplish this latter, I had to take off my shoes, socks, and jeans and climb into the December water, a bracing experience indeed.

When the pool was full, I turned the pump back on and poured eight pounds of diatomaceous earth back into the filter, via the pump intake.

And what might I have forgotten?

What, indeed. I forgot that I hadn’t turned the backwash valve off.

Oh yes.

All the time I was dumping pound after pound after suffocating POUND of D.E. into the intake, the pump was gushing it out the other side. By the time I realized this, the backwash hose had dug a hole in the desert landscaping and sprayed DE all over the side yard.

What an incredible MESS. Now I’ll have to pay Gerardo to come over here and repair the landscaping. Merry Christmas.

So now I shut the pump down, turn off the backwash valve, and turn the pump back on.

This causes VAST CLOUDS OF D.E. TO VOMIT INTO THE POOL THROUGH THE OUTLETS!!!!!!

For godsake.

Now the pool water is opaque. Not only that, but the pump is running at 10 psi, well above normal.

I call the pool service people and get a human. Of course, the dispatcher hasn’t a clue. She recommends that I turn off the pump, though I suspect that over time it will suck the stuff back in and catch it in the filter.

The pool guy will be here on Tuesday, minimum $85 charge plus parts plus whatever else they can dream up.

It took another hour to refill the pool back to its normal water line.

So, it’s off to the grocery store. I’m feeling too depressed to go to the Safeway and the Costco and the AJs, so I decide to cut it short and go only to AJs, where I can pick up the coffee and the bacon I happen to favor. The rest of it: later.

I’m starved. Consequently, against my better judgment I buy a take-out dinner of vegetarian pesto Yuppie gourmet lasagne and a bottle of wine. I’m freaking depressed, too. So I buy not one but two bottles of my favorite bubble bath, of which I’m about out. They have a new scent. How can I turn it down? And some gelato. Double chocolate. And carmel de leche.

While I’m feeling sorry for myself in the grocery store, I run into an old friend from Arizona Highways.She tells me she’s out of work, sliding into debt, and anxiously searching for a job. Do I know of any PR openings?

Dear god. This lady is highly professional, very good at what she does, and has an impeccable track record. If she can’t get a job, times really are tough. I tell her about LinkedIn, promise to send the names of every spy I can think of, and stumble off to the cash register. The bill for all the indulgences I’ve picked up comes to something over ninety bucks.

Back at the Funny Farm, I decide to turn on the pump no matter what the Leslie’s dispatcher says. The D.E. has settled. I run the brush over the steps and bottom by way of getting the stuff back into circulation, stirring up more VAST CLOUDS of opaque fog. Too late, I realize that if I had let the powder stay on the bottom, I could have simply taken the manual vacuum and schlepped it into the filter that way. Duh!

I bolt down the take-out, two glasses of wine, and a bowl of ice cream. At this point I’m shivering cold, three sheets to the wind, and dead tired. I lay down on the sofa in front of the space heater. The dog jumps up and settles in next to my feet. I fall asleep but soon am awakened by the dog fussing.

Two pillows have dropped off the sofa onto the floor, where they’ve come to light (heh) directly in front of the space heater.

Sumbitch!

I leap up, grab them, and toss them across the room. Luckily, they haven’t yet caught fire.

cooktopNow I put a trio of chicken thighs into a pot of water to cook for the dog. I go into the back room to work on Quicken. A bit later, I figure the meat’s cooked. It is. And the pot has splattered greasy water all over the top of the stove and the tiles, baking the chicken grease on around the burner.

Last night after the yard sale, I used the last of the stovetop cleaner to scrub a week’s worth of grease and crud off the top of that G.D. stove.This, you might note, left me left with no stove cleaner and little vinegar.So we’re talking a brand spanking clean stove that is now covered—again—in baked-on grease and calcified water.

I try to clean it with Windex.

FAIL.

Now I sprinkle on some baking soda and scrub the stove clean with that and the rest of the vinegar. Works, but it’s a hassle.

Feeding the dog uses up the last of the cooked rice. I decide to use the chicken broth to cook up another cup of rice—which, we might add, uses up the last of the dry rice, necessitating a trip to Sprouts. Later. I put the three soiled burner grates into the dishwasher and turn the washer on to its full cycle. Then I go back into the office to make a couple of online transfers and finish Quickening while waiting the 25 minutes for the rice to cook over the one remaining undefiled burner.

By now, mind you, the dog is loaded and cocked.

Twenty-five minutes later, I walk into the kitchen to find the rice has overflowed all over the damned stove.

So I get to scrub the stove again, while the dog campaigns for a walk. I finally finish this project, take the dog out into the MIGHTY CHILLY night, and hope she will do her business quickly.

No.

We have to sniff every blade of grass, every stone, every freaking crack in the sidewalk. Not only that, but I swear to god, every third neighbor is stumbling around his garage and eyeing us balefully as the dog threatens to dump on his lawn.

Of course, I have bags with me to pick up after the dog. But I’d just as soon not be glared at by the proprietors while the dog tries to make up her mind which lawn to use as her personal doggie loo.

Finally she releases her ammunition on Harriet’s yard. Freaking freezing, I drag her home. She is unhappy, since she wishes to journey southward, not turn back to the house.
And as I sit here bellyaching about all this, the dishwasher is making its vibrating/grinding noise.

Three hundred eighty bucks, plus parts, plus tax.

Yard Sale, II

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VickyC ended up clearing about $700 on the Big Yard Sale Adventure. We held the sale open again yesterday (Saturday) from about 7:00 a.m. to around 3:00 p.m., and she sold a great deal of Stuff.

We also ended up having a lot more fun yesterday, because we met a whole bunch of interesting people. On Saturday folks have time to stop and chat.

yardsaleThe sorta-gentrifying neighborhood of shotgun houses and 1920s bungalows where VickyC lives is extremely diverse, populated not only by wanna-be Yuppies, penniless now but one day to be affluent, but also by many Mexican immigrants who communicate through their English-speaking young children. A Sikh temple is a-building down the street, and so quite a few Sikhs live in the neighborhood—an interesting and friendly set. Then, for reasons unknown, a LOT of urban Indians dwell in the area, most of them Navajo or at least identifying with the Navajo nation. A number of impoverished artists also live nearby. All of these people love to shop in yard sales.

An appealing teenaged boy came by in his Sikh robes, two dollars to his name. He bought a few things and coveted—ooohhh how he coveted!—the bass guitar and huge amp that VickyC’s boyfriend had contributed to the event. Of course, the $550 asking price was out of the question. He left his phone number and asked VickyC to ask the boyfriend to call to discuss. This, as it developed, was serendipitous.

The young parents from across the street dropped by with their 15-month-old baby. Dad is fully engaged in neighborhood politics. He stopped to discuss his scheme to create a newsletter that he hoped would be free of the acrimony that has developed over the years as the result of resistance to an old-timer who wants everything his way (so we were told). In the course of a long conversation, we learned a lot about the neighborhood activists, the demographics, and the City’s machinations for and against the large area included in the neighborhood association’s territory.

canyondechellyA Navajo couple dropped by with their young teenaged daughter. They, to tell the truth, were slumming, Sunday driving on a Saturday afternoon by yard-saling through a part of the urb that they considered shaky enough to be dangerous.They lived in Chandler, where they had set up household so they could send their kids through good public schools, in the absence of the same on the Res. Very mainstream middle-class in appearance, they attributed the quality of the school system and the paucity of commerce on the Res to the entanglements of many overlapping layers of government bureaucracy and observed that both of their children were doing exceptionally well in the Chandler schools. They did, however, say they probably will retire to the Res after the kids grow up.

The high point of the day was a 40ish Navajo woman who befriended us with a great deal of chatter and much shopping. She loved VickyC’s mom’s taste in clothes, and she selected about $60 worth of stuff (at a buck apiece). In the course of time, she told us a great deal about herself and her life, talking much more than one expects from Southwestern Native Americans, who tend to be quiet people. It seemed to me that something was not quite right, and eventually she revealed what it was: shortly after she had lost a five-week-old baby, she had fallen out of a moving pickup on the Res and sustained a near-fatal head injury. She survived by dint of brain surgery in a New Mexico hospital (where she had to be airlifted), but it took a year of therapy before she could speak normally and walk. She was very affable and explained to us how she would ceremonially free the clothing of the dead woman from the spirit that might remain and return her (the spirit) to her home at VickyC’s. Eventually she walked home and then returned with some ceremonial items that VickyC could use to assist with this process; she explained how to use them and what all those customs meant, she said, “in your way.”

She waited around most of the day for her husband, who was junketing with his workers, to arrive with some cash. During this time, she folded clothes and kept us company. As one might expect, he was less than thrilled with the plan to fork over $60 or $70 for used valuables. VickyC dropped the price for the mountain of clothing she’d selected to $20 and he relented.

By this time, it was getting late. VickyC announced she was closing the show and started dragging stuff out to the curb, where she intended to leave it for free. When hubby heard this, his enthusiasm rose. Now he started to make his own selections of used valuables, among which, to VickyC’s delight, was an oak entertainment center she had not unloaded. A Mexican woman was also there when the “FREE” announcement came down. She loaded up all the clothes our Navajo friend rejected, along with stacks of kitsch and old cosmetics.

I suggested VickyC call the Sikh kid, since he also coveted a number of valuables but had run out of cash. He appeared in an instant, delighted to get a Giants athletic jacket, a bunch of other baseball clothes, and various tschochkies not to be missed. (What is that kid going to do with that stuff?)

These folks virtually vacuumed the front yard! By the time we were done, all we had to do was haul the trash to the bins in the alleys and carry the tables back inside.

So, it was a great success. To celebrate, we went to dinner at one of those urban underground restaurants that no one knows anything about but everyone should. If you’re ever in Phoenix, it’s the Piccolo Cucina at the corner of Oak and Seventh Street. Don’t miss it.
🙂
hágoónee’ for now

Photos:
California Yard Sale
by S. Michael Miri

Planned obsolescence

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You know, one reason U.S. car manufacturers began, lo these many years ago, to lose out to Japanese and German manufacturers was that American cars were designed to crap out in about five years. Back in the day, a vehicle with 50,000 miles on it was a decrepit bucket of bolts that stayed on the road only by dint of miraculous intervention from master mechanics who had died and been transformed into angels in heaven.

You’d think product manufacturers would have heard the message when consumers moved in droves to Toyota and Volkswagen, which were making vehicles that not only ran more efficiently and more safely but also ran for at least 10 years or 100,000 miles without requiring a major landfilloverhaul. But noooo…. Planned obsolescence not only lives, it thrives. The notoriously short lifespan of computers and other electronic products is well known, though apparently consumers are too sheeplike to mount any serious protest. Back in 2006, the Christian Science Monitor suggested that manufacturers of obsolete PCs and iPods, which are full of fine toxins such as lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and barium, be required by law to foot the bill for collecting their deliberately defunct toys and disassembling them. Too bad our soon-to-be-former leadership has proven to be every bit as irresponsible as the big-monied interests that put it into office.

If you don’t care what this ever-growing mountain of unnecessary garbage is doing to the water you drink and the air you breathe, you might consider what it does to your pocketbook.

bosheThe other day I learned my Bosch dishwasher, which has gone senescent at the age of FOUR YEARS, needs a $400 repair. The repairman assumed I would want to junk it and buy a new one, for a mere one or two hundred bucks more than the fix-it job.

Yeah. Nice timing, eh? Merry Christmas: you get to blow half your savings on another new piece of junk, just as an economic depression is rolling down on you.

Four years and a dishwasher dies? Used to be you could expect one to die in a seven years. But, my chickadees: back in the Paleolithic period, dishwashers, refrigerators and stoves could be expected to last forever.For the lifetime of your house!

Don’t believe me, do you?

Well, it’s true. In 1969 my former husband and I bought a fully renovated old house in the historic district of lovely downtown Phoenix. The KitchenAid dishwasher in the house was about two years old when we moved in. This miraculous machine allowed you to drop in dishes while they were really dirty—you didn’t have to prewash them at the sink before running them through the wash cycle. Back in the stone age, this was quite the innovation.

Despite the new technology that made such a trick possible, that KitchenAid was still running, and running well, when we moved out of the house over fifteen years later.That would have made it seventeen years old and still functional. It required, as I recall, one visit from a repairman in all those years.

The Amana side-by-side refrigerator did die about a year before we left: it ran trouble-free for over sixteen years.

Now we learn that a Bosch, a very expensive item, indeed, can’t manage to stagger along for more than four years?

I turned to Bosch after a negative experience with Maytag, once among the highest-rated household appliances. When I replaced the harvest gold clean-it-yourself wall oven and the el cheapo dishwasher in my last house, I bought Maytag appliances, having been assured by authorities such as Consumer Reports that these were top-of-the-line and would run for the full 15 or 18 years one would expect a big-ticket item to last.

Wrong. Five years later—almost to the day!—the oven’s heating element exploded and started a fire, and two days after that the dishwasher died. Both appliances had to be replaced. Fortunately, the fire in the oven caused so much damage my homeowner’s insurance paid for that. But I had to foot the bill to replace a dishwasher that should have continued to run for another five to ten years. At that time, an appliance repairman told me that kitchen appliances are engineered to give out in about seven years.

I will never own another Maytag product as long as I live. And now I’m thinking I’ll never own another Bosch, either. Four years is just not enough functionality for a $600 to $1,500 appliance! Especially one that ranks at the top of consumer ratings for “reliability”!

If this is “reliable,” do you get all of 18 months out of a less highly rated brand?

It’s one huge ripoff!

There’s simply no excuse for this kind of consumer abuse. We know kitchen appliances, like cars, can be made to last upwards of a decade. So, obviously, can computers: the only reason you’re forced to throw out a perfectly functional piece of equipment is that manufacturers deliberately design their product campaigns so that your computer soon will no longer operate in a rapidly—and unnecessarily—changing environment.
Consumers in America and worldwide need to get their act together and force their governments to bring a stop to this kind of outrageous waste and greedy exploitation. Write to your Congressional representatives and demand passage of bills to force makers of appliances and electronics to pay the real cost for manufacturing products purposefully designed to rip us all off.
landfill2photo by D’Arcy Norman