I just spent a couple of hours writing on how freelancers should set their fees, based on posts by Mrs. Micah and by veteran editor Katharine O’More Klopf. The subject seemed especially germane to The Copyeditor’s Desk, and besides…neither Tina nor I have posted there for a while. So if you will, please drop by CED to view Setting Your Freelance Fees, a subject that seems to be growing nearer and dearer to PF bloggers’ hearts as more of us struggle to cope in the faltering economy.
Jobs we’re glad we don’t have
The neighborhood awoke to the sight of the Little Colorado flowing down the gutter on my side of the street. During the night the water main broke where it connects with Other Daughter and the Son-in-Law’s plumbing system, turning their nicely desert-landscaped yard into a swamp. As we scribble, the City is digging up the kids’ yard with a backhoe. The water is off for all the houses up and down the street and will be for another couple hours.
Fortunately, I happened to notice this an hour or so before the City showed up, allowing time to draw out and filter a few gallons of water. The tap water is full of dirt, but the Brita seems to have screened out the visible particulates. I boiled a couple of gallons so as to refill the dog’s water dish and have a little drinking water. Now I’ll have to replace the filters on the Brita and the refrigerator and run the Brita jug through the dishwasher. {sigh} Ain’t life ruff.
The City’s guys showed up pretty quickly. Other Daughter said they’d noticed the mess when they got up around 8:00 a.m., and the workers were here within 90 minutes or so. And if you think your life is ruff, just consider what it would be like to spend the day after Christmas shoveling water-laden gravel aside and excavating an unhappy resident’s yard. Several times…. The guy who came to my door to report that they were turning off the water said they’d just come from another burst main and would go to a third one directly after this.
It rained so hard last night, a couple of times I thought it was hailing. It was still pouring when I went to sleep around 10:00 or 10:30. So the rock and soil those guys are shoveling is waterlogged to the tenth power. Augh! what a way to make a buck.
One of the things I can’t grasp is the niggling resentment of the union wages autoworkers and other laborers have managed, over decades, to put in place, and the insistence that these folks’ wages should be pushed DOWN rather than that workers competing with them in other countries and in right-to-work (for peanuts) states here should be paid a fair rate. Tradesmen and skilled laborers keep this country running,IMHOone heck of a lot better than the billionaire financiers who put us in our present pickle, than the pretty faces on television and movie screens, than the chemically enhanced athletes that amuse us by chasing a ball around a field, and than Congressional representatives who just voted themselves a raise in their six-figure salaries.
Give the auto workers—and your city’s workers and your kids’ teachers—a raise, and make upper-level management and Congress take a pay cut. Now that would stimulate the economy!
And if you’re not in a job where the public begrudges what you’re paid for the privilege of shoveling mud, be glad of it.
w00t! Merry Christmas!
M’hijito got me an AirPort, hooked it up to the stereo in the front of the house, and persuaded it (after an hour or so of technodinking) to talk to the Mac. Then he produced an external hard drive and loaded his entire lifetime collection of 14,100 songs into iTunes!
LOL! Now I shall have music wherever I go.
🙂 😀 🙂
May every reader’s Christmas be beautiful and fun and full of love.
For a Christmas money chuckle,try this one out.
And may none of you be reading from the Chicago airport.
Photo:Mila Zinkova
Funny is one year old!
Today is Funny about Money’s first anniversary. I started this blog one year ago today. It wasn’t great at the outset, but I think it’s improved over time.
Because I started itas an idle lark in Apple’s iWeb, it suffered from that program’s weaknesses, one of which is that iWeb doesn’t have an effective way to track traffic and its code is too arcane and inaccessible to allow amateurs to install web-based traffic counters. So by the time I switched to WordPress last August, I had no idea how many people had visited the site and what pages they had seen; all I knew was that the home page had over 9,000 hits. Where visitors went before or after that is anyone’s guess. Since August 7, when the site went live at WordPress, Funny has had 37,800 discrete hits. That’s over 10,600 hits a month, which just amazes me.
Hands down, the most popular post was the one that described how to use olive oil as a hair conditioner. Posted on August 19, it still gets 30 to 40 hits a day! Who knew?
Olive oil is hot. As it were. The runner-up is usually Olive Oil: The Miracle Skin Cleanser. The one on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out the highlights in your hair also gets several hits every day. Ah, blogger: thy name is vanity.
I don’t know that I could say which were my favorite posts.
Single in a Couples Culture got a lot of good feedback.
So did Is Frugality un-American?
I think Consumer Headaches: 15 Ways to Get Help was one of the site’s most useful posts. Well…except for the olive oil business, of course!
And I like the piece that explains how to make biweekly pay “fit” the realities of a bimonthly world by setting up a “pool” account and using it to fund piggy-banks that cover monthly expenses.
Home Inspections: Hire Your Own Craftsmen also went over well with readers.
Stealing from the Students is one of the best of many rants I published during the year. Later experience—episodes of plagiarism and plumb laziness—demonstrated that students recognize the administration’s cynicism toward them and take the understaffed and often pointless required courses about as seriously as the university seems to take them.
One of my favorite topics seems to be the cost of owning a pet…especially after I figured out that I’d spent over $48,000 on the German shepherd and the greyhound!
That notwithstanding, what did I do shortly after the shepherd’s demise? Oh yes.
Well, speaking of that expensive little friend, it’s after 10 a.m. and I haven’t fed her, nor have I started to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities.
- Adoration of the Wise Men, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Merry Christmas to all of you who observe it. And happy holidays to everyone!
Moments of Fame
We have a new PF carnival out there and its very first edition is online: the DIY Jubilee at Financial Wellness Project. The carnival is still quite small, but I’m sure it will grow. Funny’s discovery that ashes will polish silver appears among the 10 selections. If you’re craving a big weekend job that will save you some bucks, check out Condo Blues’s elaborate how-to on sealing leaks in your ductwork. On a related topic, Heather at the Greenest Dollar discusses insulating your home. And if all that work leaves you craving some play, check out the kid-friendly DIY Christmas presents at More4Kids Family.
Back in the land of vast carnivals, Andy hosts the 184th Carnival of Personal Financeat Saving to Invest. He’s in Australia just now and kicks off the round-up with a photo of the Sydney Opera House. More pix of that amazing country follow. Here’s a useful reference for those who tweet:at Bible Money Matters, Peter lists 125 PF bloggers who haunt Twitter. Four Pillars has a lively discussion going about a pet peeve of mine, business owners who advertise their Christianity. BripBlap wonders if saving might be stupid…and after losing a fair amount of my shirt (and bra) in the market, I’m beginning to wonder, too. The real stupidity, IMHO, was in not seeing where the Bush Administration’s voodoo economics were taking us and so failing to prepare for recession as soon as Dubya and his puppetmasters took office. Speaking of planned obsolescence (which I suppose is what the two-term limit amounts to), Funny’s less political comment on the same appears in this carnival.
Dorian Wales has posted the 90th Carnival of Money Stories at The Personal Financier, where Funny’s rant about privacy-invading call center employees appears. SVB makes editor’s pick here, with a savvy list of ten things to do when you get laid off. StumbleForward.com writes on a subject that I haven’t seen discussed in any other PF blog: the timeshare scam. Author Christopher Holdheide describes several ways to get out of a timeshare…it ain’t easy! No Debt Plan discusses the comparative advantages of 30-year and 15-year mortgagesand comes up in favor of the 30-year plan.
The Festival of Frugality has jumped the pond for its 157th edition and landed at Miss Thrifty’s site. The highlight here is a gracious and beautiful video message from the Queen of England. After that we turn to the posts, headed up by an extremely interesting list of clues about cell phone usage from MobileMaven. At Budgets are Sexy, they’re figuring how to send the Mrs. through graduate school. Frugal Homemaker Plus is startled to learn that she’s single-handedly bringing down the world economy with her miserly frugal habits…she and all the rest of us cheapskates, eh? Speaking of miserly curmudgeons, Funny’s rant about clutter appears in this carnival.
This week’s Make It from Scratch Carnival appears at Adventures in the 100-Acre Woods. As usual, a lot of dangerously delicious recipes appear in this round-up. Uh oh…check (heh) out this close-to-authentic Czech potato salad. Believe I’ll make some of that today. Mary at Simply Forties suggests trying a duck for your holiday dinner—M’jihito and I did it for Thanksgiving, and I can testify that the results were well worth the effort. Almost Frugal Food posts five wonderful ideas for using leftover cranberry sauce…some of which look better than the original use. Funny’s series of recipes for Christmas dinner appears in this carnival.
The 44th Money Hacks Carnival is up Where Are You Now. Funny’s justification for hiring a couple of cleaning persons surfaces in this round-up. Scott Crawford at DebtGoal has an extremely interesting article about the possible unintended consequences of the pending credit-card reform regulations. Hm. We may all soon be paying for purchases with cash, check, or debit card. Dividends for Life discusses investment in long-term bonds and considers whether this is a good time to buy. Mr. Tough Money Love looks askance (far askance!) at Our Beloved Leaders’ strategy to combat the recession. And at a second site, Go to Retirement, the same author ruminates on the advisability of waiting till age 70 to collect retirement.
Volunteer!
Lookit this! Among a long and wonderful list of plans to improve life in 2009, Master Your Card publishes a link to this amazing site, a “job bank” for people who want to volunteer.
You enter your location and your skill or your interest, and presto! Up comes a list of volunteer opportunities that look custom-tailored for you.
This is a fantastic tool. One of the reasons I don’t volunteer as much as I would like is that I have no idea who can use my skills or how to access organizations that I’d like to work with. Too often if you cold-call an outfit that’s not actively looking for volunteers, you get a cold shoulder, because they already have everyone they need or limit their choices to an in-group. Here you can find organizations that are advertising for people to join up.
When I entered “editor” and my city, SIX volunteer opportunities came back, two of them very interesting. Enter “gardening” and a long list of neat possibilities comes up, all over the Valley.
Don’t miss the rest of Master Your Credit Card’s piece…especially the video on how the boob tube works on your brain.