Coffee heat rising

Recession moves in to the front yard

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Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum has been foreclosed. Yesterday evening the neighbor behind me, whose address is the same as Dave’s except it ends in “Lane” instead of “Way,” showed up at the door with a foreclosure notice that had been plastered on her door. She was shaken up, because at first she thought it applied to her house and was afraid she’d been the victim of a scammer. But on closer inspection we saw that it had been delivered to the wrong address and was intended for David.

My feelings about that are mixed. On the one hand, I’ll be happy to see the end of Dave’s proprietorship. On the other, I don’t look forward to another rental across the street! Maybe the new tenants can band together with Biker Boob and open an entire chain of shade-tree mechanic’s garages. And I feel bad for Dave: though there are times when I’d like to kick him in the shins, he is a sweet-natured and quiet man. Besides, given how overgrown my front yard has become what with the thick screen of shrubbery designed to block the view of the Weed Arboretum, I can’t be calling his kettle black.

Well, if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get somebody who wants to live in the property and actually will take care of it. Not likely, though: the people who bought my old house after La Viajera defaulted are letting it go to pot. Often folks don’t realize how much it costs to maintain an aging tract house, and they just can’t afford to keep it up.

Dave owes $320,000 on a house that couldn’t have cost him more than $80,000 or $100,000. He’s been in the neighborhood at least as long as I have, and I paid an even hundred grand for my first house here. LOL! I guess it explains why he never goes to work: he’s been living on the equity!

M’hijito dropped by last night. We considered the possibility of trying to buy the place and either moving him and his roommate in there or renting it out. It’s really a wreck, though. The place has always been a disaster area—it was run down long before the Bubble came along. I’m afraid the cost of making it livable would be more than we can sustain.

Here’s how it looked when I moved in, back in 2004. Nice plywood in the front window, eh? Satan, the previous owner of my house, had quietly paid David to store the boat off the lot while the house was on the market, so it’s not visible here among the trailers and the vehicles, plus the junker car and the flatbed trailer full of ORVs are missing. Satan probably arranged to have the yard cleaned up, too: it hasn’t looked that good since he and Proserpine moved out and I moved in. The boat in the photo at the top of this post is a new model; he replaced the old one, which was nonfunctional and faded blue, with a nearly identical one in red.

M’hijito is beginning to worry that we won’t be able to turn over the Investment House before the 15-year period that we have to pay off the 30/15 loan runs, and if that happens, we won’t be able to refinance. That’s a bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it, though. If we sell now, we’ll just break even; in fact, we might sell at a loss. Fifteen years is a long time. While it’s true that the D word is being bandied about in high places, if the world economy goes into a depression, we may have a shot at coming out of it in less than 15 years. Maybe not: as someone pointed out, the Dark Ages was actually an economic depression. But things move a bit faster these days….

Scary times

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Well, we all had quite the adventure yesterday. I woke up an hour ago—12:30 in the morning local time—wondering if I should move all my investments into the money market. Nothing like the dead of night to ramp up the panic factor.

In fact, though, I see that Vanguard lost all of $738.13 against many tens of thousands of dollars, and so I’m feeling a little saner.

Don’t have up-to-the-minute data on how the big IRA (a different fund) that Stern and Reimer manage is doing, but in past slumps Stern has worked the occasional small miracle. Checking the current holdings, I see he dumped Morgan Stanley and AIG a while back…and interestingly, we own Bank of America. How does that man know? He’s bought my son’s employer, so I guess he doesn’t expect that outfit to crash in flames soon. A fair amount of oil: Occidental, Exxon, and Conoco Phillips. And…hmmm…he’s moved a ton of money into cash reserves. Yipe!

At any rate, I guess I won’t be going broke soon. Later, maybe, but not today.

Why are we paying for this?

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So this morning I call The Hartford to find out whether jacking up the deductible on my homeowner’s insurance will save enough to help keep my in the house after retirement. The punch-a-button maze robot answers the phone with “If you are calling regarding property damage from a hurricane, please press 1…”

Is there any question why our homeowner’s insurance is surpassing unaffordable? If I maxed out the deductible at $4,000, it would save me all of $21.50 a month…not worth the risk of having to cut four grand out of retirement funds in the event of a fire or a falling tree. Raising my deductible from $250 to $2,000, as I decided to do, will save $114 a year: a grand $9.50 a month. Who pays for all the repairs insurance companies shell out to people who stubbornly insist in living in the way of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, landslides, and earthquakes? That’s right: you and me, in the form of ever-soaring insurance premiums.

As we scribble, an army of rescuers is searching for more than 2,000 morons who flat refused to obey mandatory evacuation orders. These clever folks—those who can be found—are being ferried out by boat and helicopter. These are the same hardy denizens who graced Internet news videos as they were sitting around a bar getting drunk a couple of days ago. Now they’re whining because they have no air conditioning, water, or toilets.

“The storm was easy,” the New York Times quotes one Brenda Shinette, who at 51 is old enough to have known better. “I feel like I want to pass out, but I can’t tell if it is from too much heat or too little food.”

Is it possible to pass out from a deficiency of I.Q. points?

“Next time they should warn people about this, not the storm itself,” said another bright soul surprised by such details as floods, power outages, water outages, toilet outages, snakes, mosquitoes,roving packs of dogs,and rotting food.

What is it about get the hell out now get out get out get out you will die if you do not get out that you don’t understand?

“I thought we were going to need Noah’s ark,” said one Elizabeth Madson, who at 45 not only is old enough to know better but who has lived on this hugely at-risk island for seven years. “It was horrific. I would not wish that on anybody. . . . Anymore, if they say a hurricane is on its way, I’m leaving two days before.”

Some mules can learn if you whap them upside the head with a two-by-four.

It’s easy to make fun of individual morons. But then we have the corporate morons. How much do you suppose our insurance premiums will rise to cover the losses to the owners of the now-nonexistent Balinese Room, a nightclub built 600 feet into the gulf, and the Flagship, a hotel on a pier extending 1,000 into the gulf?

And how much will our taxes rise to cover the services of hundreds of search-and-rescue workers, to repair and rebuild utility infrastructures, to clean up the flood-deposited muck, to rebuild levees intended to turn back the sea so these fools can move right back in?

The normal elevation of Galveston Island is8.7 feet above sea level. Much of the developed part has been artificially elevated, andit’s sinking.

Whether or not you believe global warming and its consequent flooding, violent storms, and drought are all a figment of the liberal imagination, you have to agree that we as a people should not have to pay for the folly of individuals and corporations that insist on parking themselves in harm’s way. Living at sea level directly in the historic path of huge, massively violent storms comes under the heading of parking yourself in harm’s way. So does living in a trailer in tornado alley; building your house in the middle of a beetle-infested, drought-stricken forest; living in hills covered with chaparral evolved to actually benefit from wildfires; dwelling atop an earthquake fault; and taking up residence on the side of a dormant volcano. The rest of us should not pay for the predictable results.

It’s past time We the People brought a stop to this nonsense.

The federal government should tell insurers not only that they do not have to insure property in high-risk regions, but that they cannot insure it. It should be against the law to insure homes and businesses in places like Galveston Island—or in any other area at high risk of natural disaster.

Whatever tax incentives exist to encourage building in these areas should be eliminated. In fact, federal, local, and state governments should charge exponentially higher taxes to anyone who insists on living in fire, flood, and earthquake zones. And people who require the need of search-and-rescue teams after ignoring officials’ warnings to evacuate should be made to pay the entire cost of the rescue operation that gets them out of trouble. Let the folks who can’t understand why they need to get out of the way of a hurricane the size of the entire state of Texas pay for the cost of rescuing them!

The increasing cost of insurance and property taxes, when combined with the rising cost of food, utilities, and gasoline, very likely will force me out of my paid-off home when I retire. Who’s going to rescue me? Who’s going to rescue any of us who can no longer afford the cost of underwriting other people’s folly?

Photo: Aftermath of 1900 Galveston hurricane
byKeystone View Company

Decluttering for fun and profit

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I’m more and more intrigued with the idea of focusing the yard’s landscaping on two or three limited outdoor living spaces and letting the rest go dormant. Why consume water and energy on elaborate plantings that you never see and that never directly benefit you?

Matter of fact, my yard lends itself to this proposed new philosophy. The large front courtyard, enclosed by a thick screen of shrubbery blocking the view of Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum, makes a nice place to sit in the evenings and functions as a welcoming front entry. The back porch is a wonderful outdoor dining room when the weather is nice, which is all of autumn, winter, and spring. And the covered deck to the west, with its climbing roses and shady trees, is a lovely green bower in which to enjoy a cup of coffee and read the morning paper at pretty much any time of year.

Thinking of exterior space as living space renders about a third of my large lot redundant. The chunk of real estate to the west of the driveway, which hosts a water-intensive (and dying) ash tree, wads of asparagus ferns, nine large shrubs, three desert morning glories the size of giant squids, a pointless lantana, a struggling Meyer lemon, a mountain laurel, a bougainvillea, a sickly cactus garden, and a feral bougainvillea, does nothing for the quality of my life. Or for anyone else except Gerardo, who gets hired now and again to beat back the jungle. The narrow strip along the east wall has only one function: to grow three desert birds of paradise and three yellow cassia until they block the public sidewalk, at which point they enrich Gerardo a bit more. These plants do nothing other than to add to Gerardo’s income: they provide no privacy, they bear no edible fruit, and they’re not visible from any part of the house that I inhabit.

So: in front, west of the driveway, all the shrubs go except three cassia along the west lot line. Out with the ugly morning glory mats. Move some of the irrigation drippers over to give the lemon tree extra water and shut off the rest. Out with the moribund ash tree! Replace it with one of the infant vitex trees, potted babes of the pretty tree in back, which someday will become a nice xeriscapic shade tree (possibly not in my lifetime, but someday). Out with the water-intensive asparagus ferns. Boug stays. Mountain laurel stays. Meyer lemon stays. Turn off the water to everything else.

In back, remove three unthriving, unseen, and unappreciated roses. Turn off the water to those beds.

Remove all the pointless shrubs along the east exterior side wall. Turn off the water.

Prune the trees and shrubs that form the visual barrier between my front windows and Dave’s pig sty. Cut off the water to all these extremely xeriscapic weeds. They should do just fine without being watered all the time.

I think of getting rid of the overgrown and redundant plantings as a variety of decluttering, one that should work to frugal effect. It will shut off the watering system to a third or a half of the yard.

Will the plan save money? Dunno. It stands to reason that turning off a third of the watering system would cut my bill by 33%, but it’s not that simple.Part of the city water bill goes to pay for trash pickup and sewer service.Some of the water, of course, is consumed by dish- and clothes-washing and by bathing. In the heat of summer, all the potted plants clustered on the deck and back porch have to be watered every single day, or they will die. The 18,000-gallon pool also draws a fair amount of water, particularly in summer, when it loses two or three inches a week to evaporation. The time I wandered off and left the hose running in the pool, almost overflowing the darn thing, did not help matters.

Let’s say it saves 25% on the water bill. My highest bill this year (so far) was $208. My lowest bill last winter was $63; at that time almost none of the exterior plantings got any water, nor did the pool need refilling. Assuming the base cost of water, sewer, and trash pickup is $63, the summertime cost of watering the yard and potted plants must be around $145 (i.e., $208 – $63). Twenty-five percent of the hot-weather exterior water bill would be $36.25, a modest but respectable saving that will grow as the city jacks up the cost of water.

In addition to closing down all the flora that doesn’t bear food, cast significant shade, or contribute to livable space, I’m also putting timers on the hose bibs. These will shut the water off after a specified time, obviating another pool overflow fiasco.

This is stage one of a larger project to cut the costs of living in the house, hopefully to the point where I can stay in my home during retirement.

Tomorrow I plan to call the air-conditioning company and ask them to install a programmable thermostat, and also to find out if they can restore the rusted-out swamp cooler so it will run next summer without my having to replace it. A new swamp cooler costs as much as a new refrigeration unit. While a swamp cooler runs much cheaper than a regular air-conditioner, it would take several years to pay for itself in savings. The one I put on my old house made my allergies kick up so badly it gave me excruciating headaches. Coolers at other people’s houses haven’t had that effect, but since Proserpine said she and Satan never used this one because it gave her headaches, I’m not springing to install a new one.

I’m also going to find out if it’s possible to shut off the central air conditioning on summer nights and run only a room air conditioner in the bedroom. If doing so wouldn’t cause any harm (I’ve been told that closing off a single room in summer is counterproductive, and so this could be, too), then surely cooling just one room instead of ten (twelve, if you count the bathrooms as “rooms”) would save a ton of money.

This winter I’m going to buy space heaters and heat only the room I’m sitting in. I hope to avoid running the central heating altogether, or at least limit its use to the few days when temperatures are close to freezing and it’s raining, too. Even on cold nights, the sun usually warms the house to tolerable levels by ten in the morning. Cassie has a natural fur coat, and I can wear sweatshirts.

It will be interesting to see if these strategies work to bring down the cost of running the house. If they don’t, I will not be able to stay here after my job ends.

Lemon and vinegar highlight your hair

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For blonde highlights:

Do this on a sunny day. If your hair is dishwater blonde or a lighter shade of brown, you can create blonde highlights by treating your hair with lemon juice. Either bottled juice or fresh will work. Wash your hair with your favorite shampoo. Then pour about 1/2 cup of bottled juice or the juice of one or two lemons over your hair. Comb it through to distribute well.

Apply sunblock generously to your skin and go outside. After an hour of sunbathing or puttering in the garden with your hair exposed to the sun, shampoo again and apply conditioner.

Lemon accelerates the effect of sunbleaching. While it doesn’t seem to cause damage, it brightens your hair and leaves you with subtle blond highlights.

For red highlights:

Mix cider vinegar or wine vinegar about 50-50 with water. After shampooing and rinsing well, pour the vinegar over your hair and massage it through the hair. Rinse well and follow with a good conditioner.

Vinegar effectively removes all detergent residue from clean hair. It also brings out the reddish highlights in auburn and brown hair.

Avoid getting either lemon juice or vinegar in your eyes! Lemon juice works best on hair that’s already on the light side; vinegar accentuates reddish highlights in darker hair.

Seven technological wonders I wish we had

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Why hasn’t anyone invented . . .

  • a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t make your ears ring?
  • clock/timers for microwaves and stoves that run on batteries instead of sucking household electricity?
  • a computer operating system that runs forever and never demands to be updated?
  • a freestanding, energy-efficient room air conditioner (not a swamp cooler) that doesn’t have to be mounted in a window or punched through a wall?
  • good-tasting mass-produced prepared meals with no artificial flavors, preservatives, or other weird ingredients? And that are not oversalted and oversugared.
  • an inexpensive hose timer that works when the water is turned to a slow dribble?
  • computer programs that work without passwords?