Last week, M’hijito had me over for a delightful meal at his house. The guy can really cook. I think I mentioned the amazing potato pie he made. At the outset, he’d said we’d scallop some potatoes. This was the upshot:
It was one of the tastiest potato anythings that I have ever enjoyed. He didn’t follow a recipe; he just made it up as he went. Here, approximately, is how it came together:
You need:
• 2 Idaho potatoes, thinly sliced • a small red onion, thinly sliced • a handful of chives • 1 or 2 cloves of garlic, chopped • leaves from a sprig of rosemary • butter • heavy cream • a pastry brush • an oven-proof pan
Melt a fair amount of butter—probably half a cube or more. Slice the potatoes an onions thin—a mandoline helps with this.
Arrange a layer of potato slices in the bottom of the pan. Brush a generous amount of melted butter over the top. Sprinkle on some chopped garlic, and arrange some of the sliced onion over the potatoes. Add another layer of potato slices. Brush butter over these. Add remaining onion, and place a handful of whole fresh chive leaves (no need to cut them up) over the top of this layer. Now top the dish with another layer of sliced potatoes. Add cream, but don’t smother the top layer in cream. Sprinkle rosemary leaves over the top.
Bake in a 375-degree oven about 45 minutes or an hour, until scrumptiously brown and crisp on top.
Along with the potato pie, he served grilled Costco steaks and sea scallops, wrapped in bacon. With a bottle of wine, it made an awesome dinner.
Sometimes I think the modest things I have in life are so much better than anything I could buy for a zillion dollars. Maybe I suffer from the sour-grapes syndrome. But…well, you tell me. Is this sour grapes or common sense?
The hall with the boundless ceiling
This morning La Maya invited me to go with her to an estate sale in one of the tonier parts of the far northwest Valley. The sale organizer touted “upscale” goods in a “4,000-square-foot house.” So shortly after dawn cracked, we set out for the ocean of orange tile roofs that is the westside.
When we got to the neighborhood where the sale took place, we found ourselves in one of those curvilinear tracts where all the stuccoed houses look pretty much the same. This HOA dictated dust-brown paint with mud-brown trim. It being a fancy tract, some of the houses had stone facades: dirt-brown granite, every one. If you came home late at night and three sheets to the wind, you’d never figure out which of the half-million-dollar shacks was yours.
But seriously: the area was clean, obviously expensive, and very nice. I guess.
Inside the target house, we found more beige paint and brown stone, plus lots of very expensive designer furniture, mostly brown. And huge. There was a freeway-sized L-shaped leather sectional, big enough to accommodate a theater full of movie patrons. A fat chair and ottoman that would seat three children and a labrador retriever. A leather-topped desk and $999 leather desk chair. An outlandish leather-covered ultra-king-sized bed. And on and on.
All this stuff needed to be huge, because the house’s stratospheric ceilings created so much empty, soulless space that you felt you were inside a cave. But nothing about the size or the priciness of the furniture made the house feel like anything other than a showplace for some interior decorator’s contract project. The overall effect was about as cozy as a hotel lobby.
Houses in outlying suburbs here are notorious for their shoddy construction. When we went into the professionally landscaped backyard with its spectacular outdoor kitchen and elegant two-level pool, what should we see but gaping structural cracks just about everyplace we looked. One wing of the stuccoed structure that held a gas grill, a sink, a refrigerator, and storage cabinets had pulled loose from its adjacent segment. The second level of the pool arrangement had two big splits, one on the north side and one on the south: given time and a few soaking rains, the whole lash-up will collapse into the luxuriantly finished lower pool.
The house itself looked sound…but it’s hard to tell. A skilled craftsman can cover a wealth of sins with stucco. A single crack of the sort we saw out back would create some serious homeowner headaches.
Inside, every ceiling, even over the halls and closet-sized bathrooms, was a good 16 feet high, creating vast walls to have to dust and paint—you couldn’t paint them yourself, because you’d need scaffolding to do the job. God only knows how many cubic yards of empty space had to be needlessly air-conditioned. And the effect?
Well, after we left, I remarked to La Maya that the house seemed kind of depressing. She agreed: she said the towering walls struck her as cold and unfriendly. I said I didn’t think the house could possibly be 4,000 square feet—it was only three bedrooms, none of which was significantly larger than the rooms in our houses, and although it had a generous family room and kitchen, there were only two other public rooms: a dining alcove and what must have been intended as a formal living room (the owners used it to house a pool table). She speculated that the high ceilings somehow, by a trick of perspective, made the interior seem smaller.
Could be. The house wasn’t really a house. It was a warehouse partitioned with plasterboard masquerading as walls, any one of which you could punch your fist through without bruising your knuckles. For a half-million dollars or more, the owners had themselves a cheaply built barn better sized for giraffes than for humans, a dwelling with the mood of an empty train station.
Both of us came away feeling that our houses, which certainly cost nothing like what those shacks do, are so far superior that we wouldn’t think of trading “up” to such a place. At the outset, neither of us wants to live in an outer arm of the galaxy. But more to the point, our homes are proportioned to fit people. People who actually live in a house. Simply by the way they’re built, with rooms that enclose living space, not empty air, they start out more inviting. The saltillo tiles throughout La Maya’s and M’hijto’s houses, the none-too-airtight banks of sunny windows and French doors, the varying ceiling heights and floor levels, the generous yards, the diverse and variegated neighborhoods…
The 60-year-old tract house M’hijito and I are copurchasing in the central part of town is, amazingly, vastly more pleasant and charming than any shiny new styrofoam-and-stucco affair out in the far-flung suburbs. Besides being close to everything—he’s within bicycling distance of work and walking distance of the new light rail system, to say nothing of the shopping and restaurants he can walk to or reach in a five-minute drive—it’s sweetly charming and it has a vast yard, which we soon will transform into a fine, shady xeriscapic garden. The double-course red brick walls have an air pocket between two layers of block and are finished on the inside with lath and plaster. Almost a foot thick, the walls insulate the interior so that on a 95-day degree day the house needs no air conditioning to stay comfortable indoors.
My own tract house, now 38 years old, has its own charms: centrally located on a large lot, it’s bright and cheerful with lots of natural lighting; its five citrus trees produce a never-ending supply of oranges, lemons, and limes; it has an almost trouble-free pool; and its bedrooms are huge by new-construction standards.
La Maya and La Bethulia’s house, a cut above mine and in the pricier neighborhood a block closer to the park, is paved throughout with genuine, antique Saltillos, unlike any flooring you can get today and absolutely gorgeous. So are the walls full of French doors that look out onto the pool area and into the front courtyard. A previous owner added a wing on the front parallel to the garage, converting what was an early snout house into a hacienda wrapped around a sylvan courtyard with a wall fountain, gardens, and a flowering peach tree.
All three houses fit human beings. Because they were designed on a human scale, they feel like homes and not like partitioned barns. They’re comfortable to live in, places you want to come home to. Not only that, but they’re furnished with stuff that matters to us: with tables and chairs that belonged to our mothers; with bedsteads we picked out for ourselves, without benefit of an interior decorator; with things that were given to us or pieces we scored at estate sales. Ceilings vary in height from seven to ten or twelve feet, but none enclose a volume of wasted space. The houses look and behave like places people live in.
Our houses cost nothing like the eave-to-eave palaces we saw out in the hinterlands this morning. But we think they’re better. We think they’re built better, they look better, and they live better.
In a moment of lucidity, I realized that of course if my basic survival account is padded with a five- or ten thousand-dollar cushion, what will matter in “retirement” is not month-by-month income (earnings will fluctuate wildly because teaching money will come only in spring and fall), but how much I will earn on average. That is, after the layoff, I won’t be living on bimonthly paychecks. I’ll be living on a fund of money that is restocked once a month from a variety of sources.
When income from these sources runs low, I’ll have to use some of the cushion to live on. But when income rises while community college classes are in session, the cushion should be replenished, assuming my average costs don’t overrun average income.
Thinking about this the other day, I realized to my amazement that—any way you look at it!—my income in forced retirement will be higher than my salary. Unfortunately, the changed circumstances of retirement will make that irrelevant, because costs will rise significantly. However…there it is.
When GDU is paying my full salary, the net is $3,044. The pay cut created by two furlough days a month has reduced my take-home pay to $2,836.
My financial advisor says that with a 5 percent drawdown, my savings will last 100 years. At 7% the money would last 50 years. A 5 percent drawdown plus Social Security plus teaching income should create a net of $3,288, assuming the total tax gouge is around 20 percent.
This looks wonderful, eh? Well…not so fast.
Even though my net monthly expenses will drop because I’ve paid off the second mortgage on my house and because I will cash in the whole life insurance policy as soon as this tax year ends, it still won’t be enough.
Right now I’m paying my share of the mortgage on the downtown house with a small drawdown from my largest IRA. In other words, I’m not paying the mortgage out of my salary. That cost will have to be folded in to the 5 percent survival drawdown—in fake “retirement,” I will have to help pay the mortgage out of money I would ordinarily use to live on.
Even that would be manageable…except for Medicare.
Medicare, Medicare Part D, and Medigap insurance will cost twelve times what I’m paying for health insurance now! And that will run my average costs over $3,288 a month.
Freelance income might take up the slack, but it’s so sporadic and so unreliable, I’m not including it as a source of average monthly income. As we’ve seen, the likelihood that I can keep my credit card charges down to $1,200 is slim, and so overruns of this tight little budget are probable and may be frequent. All it will take is one vet bill or one repair bill to run the thing deep into the red.
It looks like I’ll be forced to take a 6 percent drawdown, even though I don’t want to and even though I think it’s highly ill-advised.
One pool repair bill runs upwards of $115. You can’t walk into the vet’s office for less than $100. A pair of glasses costs $300. As you can see, then, at 6 percent I’ll get by…but it’ll be tight. Very, very tight.
Probably some freelance money will continue to flow in, maybe as much as two or three hundred dollars a month. whoop-de-doo!
Yesterday I dropped by the college, where the departmental chairman was hanging out with the secretary. They said not to worry about enrollments: because the college nullifies unpaid early enrollments and community college students are just as broke as the rest of us, most people wait until the week before classes start to sign up for classes. The chair was confident all three classes would make, but, he said, even if they don’t, he still has several unstaffed sections. He said he was sure I would end up, willy-nilly, with three sections.
So that will help to fill up the fund that I’ll be living on after December.
And it’s pretty clear there’ll be no problem landing three sections a semester as long as I can dodder onto a college campus. GDU has so massively shot itself in the foot—in both feet!—by jacking up tuition, adding a per-credit surcharge to the inflated tuition, and by generally mistreating students that vast numbers of students who would qualify to get into the university are going to the community colleges for their first two years.
It will be a very long time before the university recovers from its own missteps and from our right-wing legislators’ fierce, vengeful animosity toward higher education, set loose by the departure of Governor Janet Napolitano, who was able to keep the kookocracy under control to some degree. The universities in this state, especially GDU, have been permanently damaged by the crash of the Bush economy and actions of the surviving extremists in our elected offices.
It’s too bad—a disaster, really, for our state—but on a selfish, personal level…what redounds to the junior colleges’ benefit may redound to mine.
Wow! After the speed trap ticket, the gutter installation, the unexpected pool repair, the purchase of three pair of $14 shorts (what an extravagance!), the two service calls from the locksmith to remove and reinstall the complicated lock so the painter could refinish the door, and the unplanned lock repair, I’ve overrun this month’s credit-card budget by an astonishing $747.99.
No, wait; that doesn’t even count the speed trap rip-off. As it develops, the traffic school doesn’t charge the $188 gouge to your credit card until it receives a signed piece of paper from you. This month’s AMEX cycle ends on the 20th, and so if I delay mailing that thing another couple of days, the charge will go on next month’s bill.
Fortunately, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc. owes $608 of this, for hosting, computer supplies, incorporation costs, and the solid-core door and hardened lock I put on the office. Having received several payments from clients, the little corporation actually has that much to spare. Even more fortunately, because I’ve come in under budget for three of the past four months, plenty of “extra” money has collected in the account that I use to pay credit-card bills. I hate to have it go away, because I was counting it as part of the savings that I hope will ease the transition to permanent unemployment. And pushing the speed trap rip-off forward means I start next month $188 in the hole.
Oh well. At least right this minute there’s enough to pay this month’s bill.
Check out Room Farm’s report on what’s going on at Twitter about the Iranian election and what tweeters can do to support people demonstrating for fair voting there.
Will someone who can get into RF let Chance know the post that tells what other things people can do has been taken down, allegedly for nonpayment (yeah, right!). Maybe she has a record of what was said in that post?
On the way home from GDU, I trekked up and around to Paradise Valley Community College, site of my next part-time gig. From there the nice new Costco at Cave Creek and the U.S. 101 is sorta on my way. So I dropped by to pick up a few tomatoes and a bottle of wine.
Two bottles of wine. Tomatoes. Cantaloupes. Prepared osso bucco (!). And what have we here? A pair of Lizwear shorts, one heckuva far cry from the ill-fitting Levi shorts the Costco here in the ghetto had a couple of weeks ago!
Dang!
It was hard to miss the bright orange kayaks on display near the front entrance. We don’t got no bright orange kayaks. We don’t got no kayaks at all…
That Costco has a whole lotta things us poor white (and brown, and black) trash don’t got, including an array of very fancy single-malt Scotches, ranging from the tacky Glenlivet to stuff I’ve never heard of at $75 a bottle. Not to mention the Veuve Cliquot champagne…happy Fourth!
Garrrrh! Cuter clothes (some nifty shirts that have never been brushed by eye-rays from the downscale set). Fancier booze. Fancier food. More choices of kitchenware. KAYAKS!
Okay, it’s true: we’re in the middle of the desert about a zillion miles from navigable water, and no, you’re right, noooo I do not need a kayak. Just saying. That’s all. Just sayin’.
Once I get started driving over to PVCC three times a week, I believe I’ll be making Costco runs at the 101 and Cave Creek.
