Coffee heat rising

w00t! Sumer is y-goin’ out

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It’s actually COOL outside this morning: 55 degrees! October 12, and summer is over in Arizona. At last!

Seasons start and end here in a matter of moments. One day it will be 100 degrees (Thursday it was pretty close to that) and the next day, * ping! * You’ll wake up and it’s cold outside. Vice versa: Come April or early May, summer will start with a sizzling bang! after seven or eight months of balmy weather.

Soooo glad to see you, Winter! Slept all night long in a lovely cool bedroom with no help from my friends.

And now it’s off for a charity walk. Happy Sunday, all!

Cheap Eats: White bean salad

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Looks like I’m soon to be eating beans again. So I’ve been rummaging in the cookbook in search of old favorite ways to fix them. Here’s one I found in Sunset Magazine back in the days when it was really a superb resource for food and household projects. It’s very old, but very good:

White Bean Salad

  • 1 pound dried white beans
  • 2 Tbsp white vinegar (I use white wine vinegar)
  • 1 Tbsp Dijon-style mustard
  • 4 drops Tabasco (I’ve used those Korean dried pepper flakes)
  • 1/3 cup salad oil (I use olive oil or a combination of olive & some other vegetable oil)
  • salt & pepper to taste
  • about 2 Tbsp chopped fresh basil or 2 tsp dried basil
  • about 1 1/2 tsp chopped mint leaves
  • about 3 Tbsp each chopped parsley and green onion
  • minced garlic clove
  • a couple of handsful of cherry tomatoes, halved

Cook the beans: First wash them in a colander, picking them over for any that look spoiled and for any small stones. They seem to taste best if you use the long method:

The night before, put the beans in a Dutch oven and cover generously with cold water. Soak overnight. In the morning, drain beans into a colander and rinse. Return to pan and cover generously with water. Bring to a simmer or slow boil and then turn the heat to “low.” Cook until they’re tender. Time depends on how old the beans are—anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, I’d say. Test by picking up a bean or two with a spoon or fork and blowing on it. If your breath splits the skin, it’s probably done. Taste to be sure…it should be on the soft side of al dente.

If you forget the previous evening, here’s the short method of cooking dried beans:

Cover the beans in a Dutch oven with cold water. Place over high heat. Bring to a full, rolling boil and count to one minute. Immediately remove the pan from the heat and let the beans set for one hour. Drain and rinse. Return beans to pan and cover with fresh water. Bring the heat to a simmer or slow boil and then cook until tender over low heat.

Make the salad:

Mix the vinegar with the mustard. Using a wire whip, whisk in the oil a few drops at a time to make a fairly thickish sauce. Mix this and all the ingredients except tomatoes with the warm beans. Stir gently but well. Chill thoroughly—at least four hours, but overnight is fine.

Shortly before serving, add the cherry tomatoes, halved. Garnish with a few sprigs of mint, if available.

This bean salad is good on its own—makes great snacking food to keep in the fridge—and splendid when served with good grilled sausages.

The Hallowe’en grinch

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What do you do about Hallowe’en?

I get a big boot out of seeing the kids in costume. But I’ve become pretty curmudgeonly about having swarms of kids, teenagers, and even adults show up at my door asking for a handout. Several things make this custom problematic.

Most obvious, of course, is the cost of candy. You have to get the kids products that are individually wrapped, because many parents, wary of nut cases who lace treats with “tricks” of one sort or another, won’t let the kids eat it unless it’s in a manufacturer’s package. It’s pretty expensive, especially if you don’t eat the stuff yourself. Which I don’t. Any candy that doesn’t get handed out to trick-or-treaters gets wasted. I hate that. It makes me feel like I’m throwing money in the trash.

Next, there’s the issue of out-of-neighborhood families trucking their kids into more affluent areas in hopes of scoring fancier stuff. My neighborhood abuts a very tony district—we form a buffer zone between an area of upper six- to lower seven-figure homes and a couple of gang-ridden slums. So we get the overflow of kids being trucked into the swell neighborhood. Well, I wouldn’t let my kids run loose in the areas to the west and north of us, either, so I can’t blame the parents for bringing them to a part of town they may perceive as safer. But what you’ll see is twenty kids jammed into the back of a pickup and dumped on the street in front of your house. Some years, a hundred kids will show up at the door; some years, none. Just depends on which street the freeloading parents decide to use as a drop-off point.

I don’t mind giving candy to the neighbors’ kids, but…OK, ungenerously!…I resent having every kid in Sunnyslope show up at my front door demanding a handout.

When M’hijito was little, one friend’s parents used to keep a stash of expensive, healthy treats for the neighbors’ kids and a big bucket of the cheapest, grodiest junk they could get for the traveling freeloaders. Worked, I guess…but something about that doesn’t sit very well with me, either. Is it OK to rot little kids’ teeth and contribute to their budding diabetes just because the kids are poor?

And finally, there’s the safety question. This neighborhood has had three home invasions that I know of—probably more that haven’t been gossiped about. I don’t open my door to strangers. Really, you’re crazy to do so. Why should I make an exception for hordes of out-of-neighborhood candy tourists? Especially when many of them are not kids. I don’t feel safe doing that.

In my cranky old age, I’ve taken to turning off the lights in the front part of the house, which discourages people from ringing the doorbell. It’s too bad…but the cost, the abuse of hospitality, and the risk kinda militate against it.

Hallowe’en! Bah, humbug!

😉

Battening down in the hurricane

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It’s probably a bit late to batten down the hatches, since the perfect storm has already made landfall. On the other hand, I wasn’t really expecting to get laid off, and now that looks like a strong possibility. So, today I’m taking a series of steps to help weather bad times. Some of these, I think, apply to just about anyone in most situations. Here’s some plywood to nail over the windows:

1. Pay off or be in a position to pay off debt

My strategy: Prepare to pay off $21,000 Renovation Loan

This is a second mortgage, not an equity loan, but because it is a loan against my house it does put me at risk of foreclosure if I can’t make the payments, which I will not be able to do if and when I lose my job. I already have $11,000 in cash savings snowflaked for this purpose. Along these lines, I moved $5,500 out of short-term corporate bonds and $5,000 out of Vanguard’s Wellington fund, the two non-retirement funds that are losing the least.

2. Identify all potential cuts in budget and prepare to implement them.

My strategies:

• Pay off the Renovation Loan, to save $374/month (the regular payment plus payments toward principal made to eliminate the loan by the time I intended to retire).
• Cancel the newspaper, cell phone, DSL (good-bye Funny about Money!), long distance service, and monthly yard clean-up. Savings: $139/month.
• Cash out the whole life policy. Savings: $30/month. This also yields $23,000 less 28% tax = $16,560 in cash, about six months’ worth of living expenses.
• Quit putting $200/month into a savings account for casual expenditures. Cut all indulgences to zero.
• Cut back budget for all other living expenses that are not regularly recurring bills.

These maneuvers will cut my monthly recurring bills from $821 to $482 a month:
1010DepressionStrategy1
As a practical matter, I probably will not cancel the DSL, since I need it for my freelance editorial business. Also, Funny is now getting about 6,000 hits a month. It may be worth monetizing it. If I did that, I would have a good argument for deducting the cost of DSL from my income taxes. It’s not much, but every little bit helps.

I could, in theory, cancel my homeowner’s insurance, saving about $65 a month. However, that’s a risky move. We’ve already seen that the minute I jacked up the deductible I darned near set fire to the kitchen. Murphy’s Law suggests that if I cancel the $780/year hit for homeowner’s insurance, a gigantic storm will come through, blow off the roof and, in a single lightning strike, burn down whatever remains.

With the monthly self-escrowing for principal payments and the monthly $200 general savings gone, monthly savings set-asides drop from $704 to $300.
I budget $1,500 a month for nonrecurring living expenses. If I’m very careful, do not indulge myself in anything, have no vet bills, and have no repair bills for the house or car, this amount can be as much as $300 more than needed. So, I’m figuring about $1,200 is what I will need each month to live on, above and beyond the costs of running the house.

3. Figure how much will be needed to live in reduced circumstances.

My strategy: Add up projected reduced savings, monthly bills, and budgeted “other” living expenses.

1010DepressionStrategy3Okay. That’s better than the $3,000 a month I’m spending now. Over a thousand bucks a month better.

4. Try to figure out where the money will come from.
At the rate the market is going, I’m assuming there will be nothing left in my retirement savings. If I use the $23,000 that will come from cashing out my whole life insurance policy as an emergency fund to cover such things as veterinary, car, and house repair bills and to cover the $5,050 a year cost of COBRA, then I’m left with this:

My strategy: add up the next year’s sources of spendable income.
1010DepressionStrategy4

This assumes the tax on Social Security will only be around 20%, but it may be significantly higher, since I will have earned my regular salary for ten months of the 2008.

The RASL (amount GDU has to pay me for accrued sick leave) and vacation pay figures are net.

As you can see, even with the RASL pay and the one-time vacation time payment, I’ll come up short at least $6,600 in my first year of enforced retirement. It’s possible that I might be able to net that much with freelance income—a typical freelancer earns about $10,000 a year, working full-time.

If I don’t get a job, I am going to be in deep trouble. But I probably can get something working at a WalMart or even cleaning house. The rich will always be with us, and they’re always in the market for servants to do their menial work.

5. Consider whether there are any other options

My strategy: Figure what happens if I try to live on cash savings for the next couple of years.

If I don’t pay off the Renovation Loan but instead use the $21,000 cash savings and the $23,000 that will come from cashing out my whole life insurance policy, then we come up with a survival fund of $44,000. We have to add $170 a month back into the monthly cost of living. RASL is good for three years. The vacation pay is a one-time thing, affecting income in only one year. Without vacation pay, my shortfall will be around $10,000; without RASL and vacation pay, it will come to around $14,000.

1010DepressionStrategy5
As strategies go, living on principal is less than ideal. I suppose I could do it if I were pushed to the wall. But selling the house and living out of the back of the van would keep me going longer.

6. Count blessings.

My strategy: Quit focusing on the tsunami’s roar and pick flowers by the roadside.

• At least I have a roof over my head and the resources to pay it off
• No mortgager will be able to evict me from my home.
• It will take the county tax assessor two or three years to put me out after I begin to default on taxes.
• M’jihito has a job and is young enough to recover from whatever happens to this country, assuming anyone in the sub-Richistan classes can recover.
• I have a nice paid-off van with plenty of room to sleep in.
• I know how to cook from scratch.
• Beans are delicious and I know lots of ways to cook them.
• The veggies I planted have started to sprout.
• My health is good and so I at least can work, if I manage to overcome the prevailing cultural bias against older people.
• The Copyeditor’s Desk is getting steady work and could (maybe) crank $10,000 or $12,000 a year for each of its principals.
• They haven’t canned me yet.
• It’s fall and so I won’t have to run the HVAC system for another six or seven months.
• The weather is drop-down dead gorgeous.
• The dog is unfailingly cute.

P1010572

Update, December 2013: As it developed, my estimates of the taxes were overblown. My job lasted until December 31, 2009, and so salary from GDU did not trigger a tax on Social Security, which I started drawing in 2010. Only a portion of one’s Social Security is taxed, and that’s only if you earn more than a certain minimal figure. As it developed, forming an S-corporation ensured that would not happen and sheltered most of my freelance income and all Social Security income from taxes.

After the layoff finally came, more than a year after this post appeared, it proved impossible to find another job. Even had the job market not dried up in the Great Recession, my age worked against me — employers wouldn’t give an old lady a second look for positions that read like they were written with my skills and experience in mind. By that time, though, I had already paid off the loan, cut my living expenses significantly, and made arrangements with a community college to teach the maximum allowable number of courses on an adjunct basis. Although adjunct pay works out to something less than minimum wage, between that and Social Security I managed to stretch a $14,000 emergency fund to cover five years, and then some.

By staying put in the market, I eventually managed to recover most of the losses in retirement funds. Five years later, total savings (including the whole life policy, which I never did cash out) are about where they were before the crash of the Bush economy. My son and I spent several years underwater on the house he and I copurchased, while he worked a miserable job at a company that overtly abused and grossly underpaid its workers. Today his house is worth what we owe on it and mine is worth what I paid for it. He has a better job and hopes for a promotion. I will never work for The Man again, and am glad of it.

1010Obamanos

Blowin’ in the wind…

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Well, it’s time to nail some suspenders onto the old oaken barrel, since that’s what we’ll be wearing now that our shirts are lost.

Called the redoubtable financial advisors this afternoon. It must be said that they sound pretty nonplussed over there. On the other hand, even though they allow that conditions are unprecedented, historic, and weird, they continue to insist that cashing out whatever pittance you have left in the market is a bad idea. One of the senior partners remarked that if the market continues to drop at today’s rate, it will only take about 14 days for it to arrive at zero.

“Is that a logical possibility?” he asked rhetorically.

“No,” he answered himself. If that happened all the stock in the land would be worthless. You could pick up an IBM certificate off the street, for free. This, he believes, does not compute. He and his colleagues are convinced the fall will stop sooner or later and the market will bounce back up.

We shall see.

The answer to another question is also blowing in on the wind: the University Academic Committee is having a little emergency meeting come Monday morning to discuss how to cope with a 20% budget cut. I’m told this is the first step toward the rumored layoffs.

We shall see about that, too. Personally, I no longer care what they decide. I’ve done all I can to protect myself should any such layoffs actually occur: applied for a half-dozen jobs that look like good fits, laid out a plan to pay off the Renovation Loan, and developed a strategy with the financial advisors to weather a period of unemployment.

Interestingly, though, I’ve spoken with a couple of auld acquaintances who, I discovered, happen to be on that committee. They tell me no announcement regarding layoffs of any specific job class was made, nor do they believe my particular set is likely to see blanket layoffs.

There’s not a thing I can do about whatever action the Great Desert University takes. And I am not going to get myself exercised over something I can do nothing about.
Thaes ofereode,thisses swa maeg.

Rumors redux

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We still don’t know whether the report of widespread layoffs is true. I did find the minutes of the University Academic Council meeting in which this was discussed, and that shows the group DID discuss another pending reorganization. No mention appears of specific layoffs affecting specific job classes. But of course, according to our spy, the members were sworn to secrecy about the layoffs.

Frankly, so much about this seems unlikely.

  • If they intended to keep it secret, they wouldn’t have announced it to the University Academic Council, whose meeting was attended by SEVENTY-NINE people, at least two of whom (that I recognize) were from the vastly demoralized West campus and therefore certain to be disaffected.
  • The UAC was charged to present the reorganization proposal to the academic senate on October 6. That was two days ago. If a layoff of ALL year-to-year academic professionals was explicitly stated in that proposal, then we would have heard about it by now.
  • GDU employs a horde of academic professionals. I don’t know how many of them are year-to-year. The librarians are continuing, and so they won’t be affected. But a lot of the institution’s work is being done by academic professionals on year-to-year contracts. Laying them all off doesn’t seem very practical…or very probable.

So I’m wondering how much of this story is accurate. There’s no way of knowing, I suppose, until an announcement is made. Or not made.

Whatever. I just applied to two more jobs, bringing my total number of pitches to six. If even one of them—especially the one I just interviewed for—comes through and does it with an offer in the ball park of what I’m earning, I probably will take it even if the current rumor comes to naught. I am soooo fed up with this garbage. Morale at the Great Desert University is in the sub-basement and still riding the “down” elevator. I don’t know one person here who doesn’t bitch and moan nonstop about their jobs—everybody is miserable. No, wait: I take that back. My dean doesn’t complain…no doubt because whining about her job to the underlings would be unprofessional.

While I appreciate a job whose workload is, shall we say, minimal, it also is boring as hell. That isn’t helped by sitting around breathing toxic air in a condemned building that was magically resurrected after having been slated for demolition years ago. I’m beginning to think that I’d like to pass the last few years of my working life actually doing something, which ain’t gunna happen here. The job at the cultural center would be hugely fun, and what a gorgeous place to spend your days. And evenings: stuff is going on over there in the evenings all the time.