Coffee heat rising

Tomorrow: Birth of a new series

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Tomorrow morning begins the first in what I hope will be a long-running, fairly regular series. I’m calling it Entrepreneurs.

Every now and then I meet or hear of someone who has an unusual or even unique enterprise. Many of these small businesses are interesting in their own right. Some are especially interesting to PF readers because they suggest creative ways to start a business that could support you or to build a side income large enough to get you out of debt or build a credible savings plan. So it occurred to me that Funny about Money regulars and visitors might enjoy learning about these highly original ideas now and again.

The first post in the Entrepreneurs series should go up in the wee hours of the 25th. I hope to run about one such story a month.

And I especially hope you enjoy these stories. If you know someone who’s bringing a creative business idea to life, please give me a lead: she or he could be featured on Funny about Money.

Selling lemonade: Germany, 1931
Selling lemonade: Germany, 1931

Image: Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikipedia Commons

Beloved Yard Dude Back, & Other Quotidian Stuff

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So Joel G and his palm tree charro showed up this morning. What a performance!

You know what charreada is? It’s Mexican rodeo on steroids, and uno charro is a cowboy on steroids. A really good charro is indistinguishable from his horse: when you watch such a rider, you understand where the idea of the centaur came from. The difference between a charro and a horse, far as I can tell, is that horses are crazy only part of the time. One of these guys’ entertainments, aptly named the paso de muerte, is to get a half-wild mustang flying around the perimeter of a ring, pursued by several men on horseback, and then jump from one barebacked mount onto the bare back of the reinless, frantic beast…at a dead run.

And now you know what machismo is: these characters define it.

DCP_2588

So the palm tree guy has to climb to the top of these trees—my yard has five of them, thanks to some mindless former owner—and cut off last year’s dead growth, the six- or eight-foot-long flower stalks, and a lot of debris. To get at the stalks, he also has to remove most of the current year’s new palm fronds. In addition to being big and heavy enough to suffocate a man, these things are lined with razor-sharp thorns shaped like tiger claws. All this is done eighty feet or more off the ground. He is, in short, a man who knows no fear.

This photo’s not very good, but from the three trees in the background, you can see how tall the things are. The power lines are a block away, in La Maya’s neighborhood: my utilities are underground.

It’s a very messy job. Palm fronds, flower stalks, dirt, insects, and debris go right into the pool. Joel hauled the large stuff out of the water, but he couldn’t get all the fine dirt and litter off the bottom. So, as usual after the annual palm-tree enterprise, yesterday morning I spent six hours cleaning the pool: started at 6:00 a.m. and finished around noon. This is why I dread having the job done: that and the cost. Joel charged only $30 per tree to risk his man’s life, but what with the traffic fine, I didn’t happen to have $150 laying around in the budget this month. Click on this photo twice to see all the chaff that’s flying out of the tree as el charro works on it.

I did make an interesting discovery: a garden hose with a high-pressure squirter on it does a  mighty fine job of cleaning tiles. The alkalinity in the pool’s water is too high, and so calcium deposits are growing on the tilework. At the same time, I’m told the pH is too low to add more acid (don’t ask! I took high-school chemistry, too, and I don’t get it either). So the tiles have to be cleaned a couple times a week, which is a job. Yesterday I really didn’t want to get into the dirty water to scrub down the debris-coated tiles, so it occurred to me to squirt them off. Lo! The white crud squirts off, too! I couldn’t believe it. Not only that, but the pressurized water rinses algae and dirt off the pool walls, especially in places I can’t easily reach with the pool brush, and bats it right out of the inlets, outlets, light frame, and gadgets for attaching a volleyball net. This is going to make my life 100 percent easier.

Transplanted a pretty little vitex tree that volunteered some years ago and has outgrown its pot. I hope this will make a nice patio tree one day, or possibly a landscape item for the downtown house. It makes a beautiful deep-blue blossom and can grow into a lovely tree. The one in my front yard is getting pretty big.

At the Safeway, they were selling chuck roasts for a glorious $1.27 a pound! I grabbed five pounds and had it ground for me and the Corgi. Cooked up a magnificent hamburger spiked with feta cheese—excellent barbecue combination! Wrap the burger around the feta, grill to your satisfaction over charcoal and, if available, hickory chips. Awesome!

After all the banging and crashing with the palm tree cutting and the pool cleaning, along about 5:30 in the evening the phone rings and voilà, there’s Gerardo! He’s lleno de disculpas for not having called: no, he hasn’t fallen out of a palm tree. He took his family to San Diego. They stayed for a week with a brother-in-law and had a great time.  He was sorry not to have taken after the palm trees this week (Gerardo, being mas hombre than Joel, does not hire a guy to do this job: he climbs up in there and has at it himself, leaving one of his half-wit flunkies on the ground to do the clean-up).  So, he wants to meet and talk about landscaping M’hijito’s digs this afternoon.

To top off the day, Her Deanship’s secretary called mid-afternoon, trying to summon me to the Presence. I was forced to admit that Macavity wasn’t there…now I’m supposed to show up over there this morning.

So, to work (such as it is).

Stress Control: Identifying rational and irrational causes of angst

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Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the university is keeping us on through December instead of closing our office, as expected, on June 30? Shouldn’t I be delighted that we all come and go at will, unmolested, and that we’re all being paid for many more hours than we really put in? What, I keep wondering, is the cause of the stress I feel about the job? Have I slipped my trolley? Is there any real reason to hate this job so much I don’t even want to think about it, much less go and do it?

The stress spinning off this resentment keeps me awake at night, causes me to grind my teeth, and drives me to drink. (Okay, not much drink…but for me, two glasses of wine or beer every single day is about 1.5 glasses too many.)

Last night I sat down with a pad of paper and started listing every reason I could think of, sane or not, that might explain my loathing for GDU in general and for my job in specific. Didn’t expect much to come of it: at the outset, I figured my problem is simply unhappiness at being laid off and worry about how I’m going to get by in retirement that will start about six years sooner than planned.

The result surprised me. At the outset, the list consisted of petty, stupid things that really don’t matter much: being rusticated to a decrepit building that was called out of condemnation for no discernible reason; the enduring stench of chemicals used to remove asbestos nine months ago, fumes that have never fully dissipated; some SOB from FacMan turning the thermostat as high as it would go (!) and then bolting the cover to the wall. I mean, really: get over it!

But as I was scribbling these things on paper, more serious issues arose:

• It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy to accept a full-time salary for doing practically nothing. Profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy.

• I’m bored stupid on the campus. Reading academic copy is not one whit more fascinating than reading freshman comp papers; it’s just a variant on boredom.

• I dislike the fraudulence of many degree programs offered not just by GDU but by universities in general. We’ll refrain from naming these, for obvious reasons, but let us observe that too many undergraduate and graduate programs take students’ money and give them precious little in return. Some courses of study turn out graduates with neither the learning and critical thinking skills a traditional liberal arts degree should cultivate nor a salable vocational skill. We have professional programs that turn out not professionals but dunderheads. Although GDU, like most large public universities, does have many highly worthwhile programs, it no longer is easy for a student to distinguish between a worthy program and an academic scam. I don’t like working for an institution that generates much of its income from questionable products.

• And speaking of fraudulence, I’m unhappy with the discovery, made in the course of doing my job, that about 95 percent of academic “research” and publication is unmitigated bullshit, and I resent being made an accomplice to that variety of institutional fraud.

Finally, as the hour grew later and I was nodding off to sleep over the notebook, the real cause of my nausée about the job surfaced. Several years ago an incident occurred whose details I can’t describe here. Suffice it to say that as a result of my doing something my dean had approved, I pissed off an über-dean, who, in a highly actionable way, shafted a woman I had hired. So actionable, in fact, that I gave her the name of a barracuda lawyer and advised her to sue the university. Had she done so, she would be corresponding with us from the Riviera, where she would be enjoying the life of Riley.

What this guy did was so crushing and so demoralizing that at the time I made a considered decision never again do anything even remotely entrepreneurial for the university. Bear in mind: I was hired because of my proven entrepreneurial track record and led to believe my job was not only to establish an office unique in the Western hemisphere but to grow it into a significant enterprise. I decided that I would allow the office to perform the work it had claimed for itself—nothing more—and that I would keep as low a profile as possible. Indeed, I would do as little work as possible, given the kind of appreciation my work had elicited.

There it was: I’ve hated my job ever since that happened. And there’s nothing even faintly irrational about it.

Over the past three or four years, I’ve pushed the incident out of my consciousness. But it hasn’t gone away. The guy pulled a nasty stunt on me and on an innocent bystander, and he should have been canned. In fact, a year or so later he was evicted from that particular über-deanship and shoved laterally into a less influential (but still highly paid) position. A day late, we might say, and a dollar short.

What can I do about this?

Probably nothing. I can’t undo what happened four years ago, and I can’t change the disaffection the incident created. There’s not a thing anyone can do to repair the damage that was done to me and to our operation, and even if there were, it’s too late now.

Still, when I awoke this morning I felt a lot better. Identifying the causes of distress and recognizing that at least one of them is in no way unreasonable helps to create perspective. At least I know I’m not crazy: I really do have good cause to feel some anger and resentment.

Should you put things like this behind you? Well, obviously. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll drive yourself nuts. But you can’t put an issue behind you until you know what it is. I knew what this one was a long time ago but deliberately neglected it. That probably was a mistake: given that there was no recourse within the institution, I should have left the job as soon as possible. “Putting it behind me” without taking action on it was like burying radioactive waste in a vegetable garden.

Putting a problem behind you probably needs to include doing something, no matter how minimal, to resolve the issue: physically getting away from it, confronting its cause, asking for redress, or finding a way to undo harm that has been done. It may be that you must do something about an issue before putting it to bed; otherwise, you risk chronic angst whose real cause grows more and more undefinable as the years pass.

What about you? Have you encountered an issue that came to affect your thinking, your attitude toward life, or your well-being? How have you dealt with it?

Beloved Yard Dude Gone

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Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.

Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicity racist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.

Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.

So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.

Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.

At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.

I’m impressed:

1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.

2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.

3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.

4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.

5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.

6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.

And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.

I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.

Image by Ginobovara, Wikipedia Commons

Food of Frankenstein

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Lovely to look at, delightful to touch, but if you eat it...???
Lovely to look at, delightful to touch, but if you eat it...???

So…you thought that documentary about food production I put you on to a while back was over the top, eh?

Evidently not. Take a look at this, will you please? Maybe I’m being altogether too credulous about this stuff…but given a bent for skepticism that fades toward the cynical, I doubt it.

Buy local.

Buy organic.

It does make a difference.

Image:
Fastily, Wikipedia Creative Commons

The high cost of Medicare

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In a comment to my recent post about planning for the pending layoff/retirement/whatever-we’re-calling-it, Abigail asks about the costs of Medicare, which I estimate will be around $300. I’ll be eligible for Medicare in May of 2010. So, between the December 31 canning date and May I’ll have to take COBRA, which will cost about $480 a month.

Medicare alone doesn’t cover all your costs: it’s an 80-20 plan. The older you get, the shorter the odds that you’ll suffer a catastrophically expensive illness. Heart bypass surgery, for example, can cost $170,000; 20 percent of that would be $34,000, which you have to pay out of pocket. Cancer treatment can quickly mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly, if you have to pay 20 percent of costs like that, a major illness—almost inevitable in old age—will pauperize you.

To protect yourself, you have to buy a supplemental policy called “Medigap” insurance. You also are required—it’s not an option—to take and pay for prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D. By law, Medicare Part B and Medigap insurance provide no prescription coverage. If you decline to sign up for Part D when you start Medicare and then later change your mind, you are gouged royally for the privilege of signing up later.

To be fully covered, you have to cobble together coverage with the standard Medicare Part A (which is free), Medicare Part B (which costs about $100 a month), Medicare Part D (which evidently runs about $30 to $65 a month but which, if you suffer an illness that requires expensive drug therapy, will leave you holding the bag for upwards of $4,350), and Medigap insurance (provided by private insurers, apparently ranging in cost from an average of about $100 to about $285 a month—it’s next to impossible to find out what the actual costs are). By the time you’ve added up Part B, Part D, and Medigap, you end up with a monthly cost of about $300 a month. That amount will never go down, and you can be sure that like every other cost else in life, it will continue to rise.

At this time, the combined cost of full Medicare coverage is about 12 times what I pay for my employer’s EPO plan, which covers my doctor of 30 years. Since 1987, he has practiced at the Mayo. The Mayo Clinic, because of Medicare’s low reimbursement rates, now refuses to accept new patients who are covered by Medicare. They will keep you if you’re already an active patient, but if you walk in off the street and you’re covered by Medicare, they won’t take you.

You can opt out of the public system and instead buy private insurance through Medicare Part C. These plans are basically HMOs, and they are dangerous. They’re extremely restrictive—you have little or no choice as to which doctors you see, and like all HMOs they’re not in business to take care of you; they’re in business to make a profit. Consequently, it’s in their interest to limit the amount and quality of healthcare you get and to direct you to the cheapest providers.

Now, the problem is that hospitals in Arizona are about as good as schools in Arizona, which is to say “not very.” It was at one of our major regional health centers where I waited over four hours with acute appendicitis and never saw so much as a triage nurse. When I finally got to the Mayo’s ER, they slapped me into surgery instantly. In another major hospital, my mother-in-sin underwent successful aortic surgery but almost died because, while recuperating in a hospital room, she had a heart attack that went unnoticed by anyone but a CLEANING LADY! Her life was saved because a maid happened to wander into the room and figured something was wrong.

Only one hospital in Arizona consistently gets top national ratings, and it’s the Mayo. That’s why you need to retain your choice of doctors and medical facilities, no matter how much that privilege costs you.