R.I.P. Anna H. Banana

This morning I finally had to give up the fight and take Anna on her final chariot ride to the vet. She was in so much pain, it just wasn’t right to continue trying to keep her going. 

Even when I’d made up my mind and SDXB helped me get her there, I still wasn’t sure…maybe if the pressure sores were what hurt so much, maybe there was something else to try. The vet, Dr. Brooke Hoppe, examined the sore spots carefully. When she manipulated them, the dog evinced no discomfort at all—didn’t blink an eye. 

Dr. Hoppe said the large sore on her right hip was not a pressure sore and that there really was no sign of infection in it. She concluded that it was a patch of somewhat inflamed skin, and that handling it did not cause any pain. That was why Anna could lay on the hard floor on top of it—because that was not what hurt. Ditto the elbow pain: her elbow patches were just the usual calluses. One had been a bit abraded, but it was not a pressure sore. 

The pain was not on the skin: it was bone-deep. Her spine was effectively calcified into an inflexible rod, and her hips were becoming deformed from the arthritis and probably, too, late-stage dysplasia. She could no longer sit at all, and to lay down she had to cantilever herself halfway there and then slide to the floor with a thud. The hair on her hocks was dirty and worn where she’d had to slide to a down position. Dr. Hoppe said there were a couple of other painkillers we could try, since the Tramadol was doing little or nothing for her. But it was unlikely they would help much, and if they did, the effort would be strictly palliative: there was nothing we could do for the condition of her bones.

So, it was time.

It’s going to be pretty lonely around this place. While I was vacuuming out the double-sided dog door preparatory to sealing it into its burglar-proof mode, I looked up and expected to see Anna standing in the door to the room, where she would be watching me whenever I indulged any such behavior. And throwing away poor old worn-out Toy was pretty hard. 

But on the other hand…  Now I can go out of town for a weekend. I haven’t even made a day trip in longer than I can remember, or visited my friends on the far west side, because I’ve had to be back here by six o’clock to feed and medicate the dog. I have exactly no one who can be imposed upon to come over here and feed the dog twice a day and medicate her upwards of six times a day. By the time the end finally dragged around, I was giving her 16 pills a day, smearing two different ointments on her twice a day, and administering four eyedrops every day. No one is gunna do that so I can take off for Flagstaff or Santa Fe. Now I don’t have to scour dog poop out of the porous CoolDecking around the pool-almost every day!-and now I can take down the jury-rigged fence that kept her from falling in the drink. Now I can trade in the gas-guzzling Dog Chariot for a more fuel-efficient car. Now when I clean the house, it will stay clean for a few days. And now that I don’t need a big fenced yard, I can sell my house and move someplace smaller and easier to care for.

It’s amazing to think that dog has been with me through several major phases of my life. When I brought her home as a puppy, I was solidly middle-aged. Now I’m old. That was part of the dilemma about putting her to sleep. Hey! My bones ache, too-my back aches when I get up, and my shoulders hurt and my neck hurts, but I’m not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil because of it. Why should anyone think she would be? But I have to allow, I can get up, which she could barely manage.

Now what? On the one hand, I think no more dogs!!!!! On the other, it’s hard to imagine being without a doggy companion. I’ve had dogs-big ones, shepherds and retrievers and a dobe and a greyhound-all my adult life. If I get another dog, it can’t be another 85-pounder. It will have to be small enough that I can pick it up to get it into the car if it’s sick or hurt, small enough that I can pick it up to take it out of harm’s way (oh! the aggressive off-the-leash curs Anna and I engaged!). Since I don’t much care for little yappers, I can’t imagine what kind of dog that would be. 

So for the nonce I’m done imagining. 

I probably won’t post tomorrow. The rest of this weekend will be spent in a cleaning frenzy. 

Later!

SUV-mania persists

Gas was $3.57 a gallon at Costco yesterday afternoon, when I stopped by on the way home from work to pay our annual dues. Having heard during the morning commute that the average price is now $3.95, that sounded like a bargain, so I decided to top off the tank.

Lines were out to the street at every pump. Fifteen people were stacked up ahead of me, and I may have been the only person there who turned off the ignition while standing. Admittedly, it was a warm day and sitting in the car with no air conditioning was a little uncomfortable-far from unbearable, but not exactly brisk and cool. Most people let their engines idle, burning gas for the ten minutes or so it took to crawl up to a pump. 

Directly in front of me was a brand-spanking-new, shiny Toyota Sequoia, dealer’s paper license still in the plate-holder. The thing is the size of a Sherman tank! Its 273-horsepower 4.7-liter V-8 must get all of ten gallons to the mile. Toyota must be giving the things away-surely the only reason anyone would buy such a behemoth would be a price tag somewhere near gratis. When it finally lumbered up to the pump, what should climb out of the passenger’s seat but a vast woman with Mma Ramotswe’s “traditional build.” She must have weighed over 200 pounds…and her gentleman friend was proportionately well fed. Big car for big folks: the springs on a beast like that should hold up under their weight, anyway.

As I stood in line breathing exhaust fumes, I counted 10 SUVs and pickups and 5 regular passenger cars. Most of the SUVs were late models. None of the sedans were low-mileage vehicles.

Pickup trucks make some sense: they’re designed to carry cargo and most people who own them use them for exactly that. Being trucks, they ride like a truck, and so it’s unlikely that many folks choose to buy them for the around-town family ride. And I can understand how you would hang on to a gas guzzler despite high fuel prices-I sure can’t afford to trade in my 2000 Sienna yet. But to go out and buy a brand-new gigantic SUV that gets 13 to 19 miles a gallon, at a time when gas is headed north of $4.00 a gallon? Clearly, market forces are not discouraging Some People’s Kids from consuming large amounts of gas and pushing the prices up for the rest of us.

Less than a third of a tank cost me what a whole fill-up used to cost, just a few months ago.

IMHO, it’s time for some legislation, and not just in leading-edge California but nationwide. We need to do more than just “encourage” people to buy fuel-efficient vehicles by offering a few lagniappes such as small tax breaks and license plates that let you drive in the HOV lane. We need to make it against the law to sell a passenger vehicle that gets less than 30 miles per gallon. Period. Force manufacturers to take that junk off the market, and force used-car dealers to quit peddling the trade-ins.

And if you can’t fit into a Matrix or a Camry hybrid, folks, maybe it’s time to go on a diet.

Amazing Grace! Annual review miracle

Great galloping zot! For this year’s annual review, my dean has given me an unheard-of 4.5 on a scale of 4.

What on earth could she be thinking? Whatever it is, let’s not anyone argue.

This is amazing. NO ONE gets a 4. I didn’t know a 4.5 was even possible.

More to the point, it means a) the flap over excising My Bartleby from our staff was not taken unkindly at all, and b) Bartleby’s efforts to undermine me, which were much more extensive than I imagined, failed. Hmmm. It may mean c) She Who Is in Power stays in power. But we’ll try not to think about that one.

In addition to engineering the exit of an incompetent employee, however, and through a couple serendipitous moments, I’ve managed a pair of coups that save my unit money and make my dean look mighty good. After Bartleby left, we proposed to replace her position with a fourth research assistantship. This scheme caused droplets of sweat to fly into the air around our vice-president’s head: an assistantship costs the university around 40 grand, far more than the 16 thou we pay a secretary. (Yes, true: for shame!)

As a place-holder until things could be shouted through and settled out, we hired a 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) hourly worker. For this position, we took on a graduate student who needed an internship in one of the College’s high-profile programs, with the understanding that she would be replaced with an RA in the fall semester.                             

Meanwhile, one of my existing RAs decided to quit the Ph.D. program, having seen the light and and in the clear white glare viewed…well, what back in the day we used to call sexism. This is a highly entrepreneurial woman who does not suffer fools (or foolishness) gladly, so she decided to walk with the master’s. Well set with a husband who earns more than enough to support her and her offspring, she proposed that I hire her in the 50% FTE hourly position; then the two of us would start working on building our own business on the side.

Hot dang. This is our workhorse RA, a person of exceptional competence and drive who could, in fact, run our office in her sleep. All by her little self. She carries a ridiculous workload as it is and thinks she’s not working very hard.

I now go back to Her Deanship and suggest that we not create a fourth research assistantship at all, but instead convert the hourly job to a 49% FTE editorial assistant. You understand, at 49%, pay is the same as 50% FTE but the university does not have to provide benefits. No health insurance. No pension. No nuthin’. Dance to spring!

What this does: it causes the job to cost the College about 30% less than it would at 50% time.

The deal is done. As soon as my RA finishes her last research unit (she defends in a week or so but will wring the last few pennies out of her assistantship by carrying research credits through the end of the summer), we convert her to an editor and fill her assistantship with a new worthy from said honored program.

Too amazing! Apparently the Dean thought so, too.

Karma is on my side, after all. The flies must have been Her idea of a practical joke.

4 Comments left on iWeb site:

BeThisWay

Congratulations!

I always knew you were off the scale!

Thursday, May 29, 2008 – 03:39 PM

Turn One Pound Into One Million

Well done, you obviously did something to deserve it!

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:06 AM

Heath Creative Solutions

What happens when Lady Luck does not smile so favorably?  I’m sure you know that in the education industry there is so much backstabbing and cutthroat politics to make even the most die-hard for-profit company CEO blush with shame.  Congratulations on your good fortune and your brilliant moves, but I hope you don’t expect that things will always turn out this well.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 – 06:16 PM

vh

Indeed. There was a reason I was concerned about this year’s review. Click on the link to “My Bartleby” for a clue or two or three. Credible word had it that Bartleby had been at the dean’s office complaining about me, on some occasions dispensing wild stories in those and other precincts. At one point, for example, she told a graduate student that she was the director of our office…that would be my job, I’m afraid.

Back-stabbing and vicious politicking are not exclusive to academia. But academics have strong skills in these crafts. The fact that I nailed the woman to the wall and came out with an astronomically high rating should give us some insight into how much “luck” was involved here….

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 – 07:39 PM

New! PF Buzz

Check out the new social media site, Personal Finance Buzz. The creation of Moolamoney’s Pinyo, it focuses on PF stories, “made by a personal finance blogger for personal finance bloggers.” 

It’s handsomely organized, with forums, a blog, and a bunch of options. Don’t fail to visit, sign up, and participate.

Great activities for a modest budget

Here’s a guest post by Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on the topic of business credit. She invites your questions and writing job opportunities at her personal e-mail address: heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Some people think you can’t have fun if you’re trying to budget and save money. I personally feel that couldn’t be further from the truth. While having to save money makes some events more challenging, you can still have plenty of fun doing activities. It all depends on what you’re looking for, but if you make a budget, you can fit many low-priced activities into your weekly schedule. 

Go to the Movies. Going to the movie theater occasionally works just fine, even if you’re trying to save some cash. The average trip can cost less then $10 for a matinee, even if you get something to eat. I wouldn’t recommend going every weekend, but the occasional flick can be a good time. If you are still worried about saving money, skip the popcorn and drink or sneak something in from home.

Rent Movies or Watch What You Have. Truth be told, going to the movies can get expensive. Deciding to rent movies or simply watching what you already own can save you big bucks in the long run. For people who are completely addicted to movies, Netflix or a similar rental service might be a great solution. With gas prices the way they are these days, staying home can end up saving you a significant amount of cash. 

Decorate Clay Dinnerware, Cups, and Serveware. While some people may feel that they are above decorating clay and going to one of those “artsy” places, I think that it’s a great use of a little money for a fun activity. It depends on what you’re interested in having colored, but usually the cost runs only around $20 or so. If you are low on plates or mugs, you can kill two birds with one stone by having a great activity while making something useful. If budget is still a concern, opt for the smaller clay products to decorate.

Cook Something New. Too many people feel going out to dinner is the only way to truly have a special meal. I personally think that food you’ve prepared yourself tastes much more delicious than many things you order at a restaurant. There’s a satisfaction associated with trying to cook something you’ve never cooked before and succeeding in making a delicious dish. The activity itself can be fun (selecting what to cook, getting the ingredients, etc.), and it also is easy on your bank account. You don’t have to spend a lot of money at a restaurant to have a nice time eating. 

Play an MMORPG. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) can be quite fun. The best thing about them is that they aren’t very strenuous on your bank account. World of Warcraft, for example, costs $15 a month. While at first glance this may seem outrageous, if you consider the many hours some people play, it’s actually a bargain. A two-hour movie may be around $10, but if you play an MMORPG, chances are you’ll spend more than two hours on it. Of course, you have to remember that these games have to be played in moderation. However, I know many people (husbands, wives, and children) who enjoy games like WoW as a family. If you’re looking for a fun activity that isn’t terribly expensive, then an MMORPG might be the ticket. 

Enjoy Lower-League Sporting Events. Chances are that your city has a major sports team or many major sports teams. Chances also are that tickets to games might make Bill Gates blush. Sporting events can really give your wallet a kick in the stomach, but they don’t have to. I know many people who take their families to minor league games and have just as much fun. College sporting events are also a great option (depending on the school of course). Rather than going to an NBA game, give the college scene a try. Rather than going to your MLB team’s game, see what their minor league affiliate has to offer. You can have a really fantastic time watching the home team without having to go into debt. 

Go for Walks. Too few people seem take the time to simply slow things down and go on nice walks. Walks are free, healthy, and can be quite enjoyable. Check out that park down the street you’ve always wondered about, or simply go to a street in your neighborhood that you’ve never explored. When it comes to walking, the opportunities are endless. I know many couples and families who find that walks are some of their most enjoyable activities together. 

Play a Board Game. What with all the online games to play, fewer people seem to be playing board games these days. Board games are the perfect activity for someone who’s trying to save cash and interact with real human beings. Watch yard sales and shop thrift shops for gently used games. Even if you do have to a buy a new one, chances are it will be a lot less expensive than the price of a visit to an amusement park or to even a movie theater. Board games are fun, cheap, and a great activity that friends and family can enjoy.

So those are some ideas for the kinds of activities that will certainly be fun and won’t hurt your wallet. If you’re trying to save money, you don’t have to sit at home and stare at the wall all day. With a little creativity, you can have just as much fun as someone who can afford to go on exotic vacations constantly (well, maybe not just as much, but almost as much).

What’s a thing worth?

When M’hijito and I were buying appliances for the Renovation House, we picked up a nice but not gaudy gas stove at Sears for about $800. It occurred to me to wonder what really, in human terms, an $800 stove costs. Based on what we know people in various trades and professions earn, here’s an estimate: 

• About 4 hours, plus an LL.D. and 40 years of legal experience, of practicing law at Prestigious Southwestern Law Firm
• About two days of house painting and plaster or drywall repair
• About 29 hours, plus a Ph.D. and 30 years’ editorial experience, of deciphering cryptic English written by Chinese mathematicians and training graduate students to spend their lives doing the same
• About 29 hours, plus a contractor’s license, bonding, and 30 years of experience in the trades, of tiling bathroom stalls and counters, demolition work, installing cabinetry, repairing lath & plaster, rebuilding foundations, installing toilets, installing glass shower doors, hauling trash, and undoing some other guy’s mess
• About 47½ hours of talking on the telephone to distressed, pained, and enraged Vast Nationwide Insurance Company policy-holders
• About five 14-hour days (no overtime paid) at the Great Desert University of grading illiterate, plagiarized papers scribbled by the sons and daughters of the American middle class
• About 66⅔ hours of scrubbing floors, cleaning bathrooms, dusting furniture, scouring kitchens, polishing windows, changing catboxes, changing and laundering sheets, dusting miniblinds, vacuuming carpets, mopping tile, and sweeping the front porch
• About 80 hours-two endless 40-hour weeks-of chasing other people’s children around, changing diapers, feeding children junk food, listening to children scream, cleaning up baby barf, and wiping toddler bottoms
• About 114 hours-that’s almost 2½ six-day or almost 3 five-day weeks, plus two weeks of walking across the Sonoran desert in 110-degree heat-of mowing lawns, trimming thorny shrubbery, digging ditches, and hauling trash
• About 155 hours-almost four 40-hour weeks, plus two weeks of walking across the Sonoran desert in 110-degree heat-of lifting demented, stinking old men and women, of steeling yourself to their wails, of stuffing food and medication down their throats, of changing their diapers, of parking them in wheelchairs and rolling them into the shower and washing the sh** and the sweat and the barf off them, of changing their sheets and changing their clothes

So it goes. Every thing that we own has a human cost. These are just the costs to you and me and our fellow workers of buying a thing. They don’t count the human cost of digging the raw materials out of the ground to mill the steel required to make its parts or the gas required to operate it; they don’t count the time and effort human beings had to put in to building it and installing the infrastructure to make it work.

 Each time we decide we want to buy an object, we should think about what the privilege of owning that object really costs.

4 Comments left on iWeb site

Pinyo

I love it.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 10:46 AM

remodelingthislife

This is fabulous!

Saturday, May 31, 2008 – 03:03 PM

Fern

You don’t sound very happy about, nor do you sound well-suited for, working at a nursing home, or wherever you “lift stinking old men and women” around.

Someday, you’ll be there, too. I hope you receive more  compassionate care.

Monday, June 2, 2008 – 06:50 AM

vh

I don’t work in a nursing home, thank God. But I watched my mother die in one. It was a horrible place. I watched the women who worked there, from the nurses to the drudges who had to do the most awful scutwork. Nurses are paid well, but drudges are not. The work is just hideous.

My mother did stink. The smell of cancer is not pleasant. Nor are the screams and moans of the desperately demented and the truly anguished.  The “compassion” you get when you’re in an HMO and your disease cuts into the profit margin is negligible.

It’s easy to be self-righteous…but the truth is, a nursing home can be a dreadful place to work, and the labor is difficult and unpleasant.

Monday, June 2, 2008 – 07:06 AM

Dog lives to bark another day

Amazingly, Anna H. Banana survived yesterday’s encounter with a vet who was searching for cancer. If she has cancer, it’s not easily detected. Nor does she have megaesophagus, the condition her previous vet speculated was the cause of the heavy breathing—her esophagus was clearly visible in the X-rays, and clearly quite normal.

What was detected, however, was extensive calcification in her spine. She has such severe arthritis that her spine is barely moveable. (Not news to any observer of her struggles to get down and back up.) The vet thinks the dog is in pain most of the time from that, which explains the pretty much constant huffing, puffing, and hyperventilating.

The plan is to treat her with Tramadol, a particularly effective painkiller that (according to the new vet) has virtually no side-effects in dogs. In humans, it has some wild ones: seizures, dizzy spells intense enough to cause falling, fainting, and uncontrollable shaking of an extremity. That’s why I don’t take it—my doctor prescribed it when I developed a life-threatening allergy to NSAIDs, but after getting a look at what it can do to you, I decided I’d have to be in outrageous pain to let that stuff pass my lips. The vet, though, insists that none of the above applies to canis lupus familiaris.

A hefty dose of this, I’m told, should cause her to snooze through the night. But I’m supposed to give her three hefty doses, one every eight hours. First dose came last night. It seems to have worked to keep her down all night…if not, I didn’t know about it, because at the same time I have her the dog pills, I dosed myself with two of Walgreen’s best knock-off Benadryloids, twice what I’d normally use as a sleeping pill. The burglars could have come in and set up a steel band, and not waked me up. One full night’s sleep—the first in about six weeks—-worked wonders on my own aches and pains: overnight the excruciating neck-ache and back-ache have almost disappeared.

Yesterday’s adventure set me back another $178, but at least we’re into another AMEX billing cycle. I had $50 left for the week, which ended yesterday. So I’m “only” $128 over budget at the end of this cycle’s first week.

Testing her for cancer and finding her (probably) free of it, however, allows us to test her for thyroid dysfunction (another hundred bucks), which I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have and probably has never had during the entire six years I’ve been dosing this animal with Soloxine and trotting her in twice a year for expensive bloodwork. There was no point in testing for a chronic, treatable illness if she had an untreatable disease that would carry her off.

If our theory is right—that the source of the dog’s pain is arthritis—and the Tramadol works on her, she should be in pretty darned good shape for an ancient dog. I hope so. With any luck at all, maybe Anna and The Beloved Ball will be around for a while longer.

And the Beat Goes On: 127th Festival of Frugality

Despite the concerns about recession, the price of gas, and the cost of food, life goes on and bloggers go on blogging. This week the Festival of Frugality received 67 entries sharing ideas, tips, and reflections on the frugal life.

In keeping with Funny’s theme of simplicity, I’ve not tried to do anything fancy for my first venture in hosting but just listed posts within alphabetical categories, in the order in which they arrived. Every entry that made the cut is well worth reading. Don’t miss the interesting miscellany that appears at the end, under “Etc.”

Editor’s Picks were lost in conversion from iWeb to WordPress.

 Enjoy!

Budgeting 

Bryce Hogan
Financial Zip
How to Create an Effective Spending Plan 

Alex
Home Life Weekly
Wedding Budget Sheet 

vh
Funny about Money
Month of Extreme Frugality (NOT) 

Dorian Wales
The Personal Financier
Budgeting for Unexpected Expenses 

Jonathan
Master Your Card
What I Think of Dave Ramsey 

Call for Ideas 

Nickel
fivecentnickel.com
Cheap Alternatives for Making Long-Distance Phone Calls?

 Cars, Gas, and Getting Around 

FMF
Free Money Finance
Save Money by Taking the Train or Bus 

Finally Frugal
Frugal Transportation…

Peter
Bible Money Matters
Drive Free Cars and Retire Rich! 

Kevin
M4K Parenting & Family Life
Gas-saving Tips

Anthoney Grigsby
HelpMyCashGrow.com
Reduce Your CO2 Emissions 

Ryan Suenaga
Uncommon Cents
Understanding the Discover Open Road Gas Benefit 

Food and Entertaining 

Financial Goal
Goal of Financial Freedom
Inexpensive BBQ Tips 

Frugal Chick
Frugal Fruit Basket

Bitsy Pieces
Bits of Pieces
Freezer Meals without the Hassle of OAMC 

Aryn
Sound Money Matters
9 Nearly Free Ways to Entertain at Home

Big Larry
Holy Cash Cow
Eat Free on Your Birthday 

Cash Money Life
Get $206 in Free Groceries! 

Squawkfox
How to Soak Dried Beans: Your Questions Answered 

Frugal Habits 

David B. Boll
Slow Down Fast
How to Become Wealthy by Living within Your Means 

FFB
Free from Broke
Are You Prepared for Summer Costs? 

Renae
Life Nurturing Education
I Am a Scavenger 

Brooke
Dollar Frugal
Save Water: 3-Minute Showers 

Mike
Living the Cheap Life
Why Living in an Urban Area Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive 

FIRE Finance
Top 7 Energy-saving Tips for This Summer! 

Gardening 

NtJS
Not the Jet Set
Everyday Frugal: In the Garden 

Michael Nolan
Frugal Mania
Taking the Worry Out of Watering Your Plants 

Jim
Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
BFP Garden Project: Need More Planters and Potting Soil 

Great Stories 

Broke Grad Student
How an Extra Alarm Clock Could Have Saved Me $100 

Investing 

Retire Happy
My Retirement Blog
Strata of Mutual Fund Expense Ratios 

Psychology and Social Aspects of Frugality 

Fitz Villafuerte
Frugal or Cheap: Test Your Mindset 

Christina
Northern Cheapskate
Why a Recession Is Good for Us 

Shannon Christma
Saving Advice
The Benefits of Saving Habits That Make You Look Poor 

Hannah
The Purloined Letter
Putting Your Foot (and Your Pocketbook) Down 

Bryce
Save and Conquer
Beating Those Summertime Budget Blues 

Emily
Remodeling This Life
Not Deprived 

Steward
My Family’s Money
The Cost of Having Kids 

Andy
Saving to Invest
Tipping Philosophies 

Bill
The Wealth Hunter
Is Your “Money Story” Keeping You Broke? 

Be This Way
Are You Going to Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You?
I Don’t Wanna Work! 

GBlogger
Can I Get Rich on a Salary?
Generous Return Policies and “Risk-Free” Trials Can Fool Your Frugality 

 

Shopping 

 

Kimberly
My Good Sense
How I Organize My Coupons

Erica Douglass
Erica.biz
Save Thousands of Dollars in Five Minutes or Less with My “Secret” Coupon Hacks

bhunter
Mighty Bargain Hunter
The Hefty Time Cost of “Free” or “Really Cheap”

Alexander
Wealth Junkies
Saving Money on Groceries 

Ben
Money Smart Life
Free Trial of Blockbuster Total Access Can Save You Money This Summer Movie Season 

Amanda Mine
Value for Your Life
Top 10 Dollar/99-cent Store Values

Mother Hen
Ship Full O’ Pirates
Photo Broadside: Fire Away!
(Scroll down in this to learn how Mother Hen got a smokin’ deal!)

Side Jobs and Extra Income Streams 

Raymond
Money Blue Book
Make Money with Paid Online Surveys 

Money King
The Money Kings
Recycle to Save the Planet and Maybe Get Paid Too 

Taxes

Wenchypoo
Wisdom from Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket
Taxing the Rich? Hell, You Can’t Even SOAK ‘Em!

Tips, Hacks, and Leads 

Jennifer
Getting Ahead
Tips for Conserving Water

Chief Family Officer
10 Tips for Minimizing Life Insurance Costs

Chargrylls
Debt Non Sequitur
Free Cash for Snowflaking – Snowflake Report – $57.83

Paid Twice
Festival of Frugality Homepage
Frugal Tip: Reusable Water Bottles 

Penelope Pince
Our Fourpence Worth
Some of the Many Uses for Vinegar around the House

Todd
Harvesting Dollars
Save Money Using a Foamer

 RC
Think Your Way to Wealth
My Frugal Phone Fix: Repairing a Motorola Razr Cell Phone

 Travel 

Veteran Military Wife
Life Lessons of a Military Wife
Disney’s Magic Kingdom on Less Than $200 for a Family of Five 

Penny Nickel
Money and Values
15 Tips for a Frugal, Relaxing, Earth-friendly Vacation That’s Car-free!

Etc. 

J. Savings
Budgets Are Sexy
George Bush Offers to Give You $2 Million, but… 

Lars
Insightsandadvice.com
Fix Your Credit Report – How to Remove Hard To Get Off Negative Items – Part II of III

Paula Wethington
Monroe on a Budget
Don’t Fret over Teacher Gifts

KCLau
KC Lau’s Money Tips
When Should You Rewrite Your Will?

MIT Beta
Don’t Feed the Alligators
Frugal Baby, Part II: Feeding Baby

17 Comments left on iWeb site

GBlogger (Can I Get Rich On A Salary)

Simple is elegant! And I love splashy red asterisks — and wish I could do them on my blog. (I guess that’s asterisks envy…) Thanks for all the work of hosting and for bestowing a splashy red asterisks on my post!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 06:56 AM

Monroe on a Budget

I like your format!

I’ll post a roundup later today.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 07:01 AM

Value For Your LIfe

I’m really looking forward to enjoying my tea and reading this week’s articles.  Thanks for including my post and for hosting!  BTW, great blog, I will we sure to come back later and take more of a look around!

Sincerely,

Amanda

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 07:21 AM

FFB

Thanks for hosting and including my article!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 07:21 AM

BeThisWay

Thanks for hosting and including my article.  Lots of great submissions this  week!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 08:14 AM

Bryce @ SaveAndConquer

Thanks very much for hosting and for including my wife’s post.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 08:38 AM

Anthoney Grigsby

Great posts!  Thanks for including my post!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 08:54 AM

My Retirement Blog

Thanks for hosting and thank you for selecting my post as an Editor’s Pick!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 10:15 AM

Mike

Thanks for your hard work. I like the nice clean layout!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 10:16 AM

Penelope @ Our Fourpene Worth

Great job on this carnival and thanks for including our post!

Penelope

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 01:13 PM

budgets are sexy

Yeah, same here!  Nice layout, and nice picks

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 01:13 PM

Billy

Great blog! There is so much valuable info here. Thanks for posting.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 03:41 PM

peter @ biblemoneymatters

thanks for the link!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 04:43 PM

Christina @ Northern Cheapskate

Thanks for the link and the star!  I’m glad you liked my post.  You’ve done a great job of putting so many fabulous articles together!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 05:46 PM

Broke Grad Student

Great job with your first venture in hosting! Thanks for the splashy red asterisk!

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 08:05 PM

Kimberly

Thanks for adding my post.. I still need to get my round up written, I’m a little behind .. but that’s nothing new

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 11:53 PM

Michael Nolan

If memory serves, this is my first time actually participating in a Festival and I LOVE what you’ve done with it!

Thanks for making the tradition continue!

Thursday, May 29, 2008 – 05:38 PM

Moments of Fame

The Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Canadian Dream: Free at 45. Funny’s post on her Close Encounter of the Real Estate Kind (possibly “of the Catastrophic Kind”?) is included here. Thank you, Be This Way, for your thoughts on the value of time and effort vs. money (my sentiments exactly!). As usual, the CofPF is full of interesting and valuable links. My eye (and breath) was caught by Might Bargain Hunter’s alarming prediction that gas will eventually reach $15 a gallon and his suggestion for how we can guess how that will feel. But [don't] be scared; [don't] be very scared: Not to be missed is Bob McD’s revelation that the sky is not falling on Social Security.

The Make It from Scratch Carnival appears at The Miller Way, where the great experiment to make a pot roast last forever appears. This carnival always contains some great recipes, and this week’s is no exception: check out The Sojourner’s awesome-looking stuffed grape leaves in tomato sauce. Those of us who are searching for economical ways to grow our gardens should see this one: at Stop the Ride, old tires as planters!

Piggy Bank Blues hosts the 61st Carnival of Money Stories. Funny’s rumination on upward mobility (or the lack thereof) appears there. Monroe on a Budget contributed a cautionary tale showing why it’s better to call a plumber sooner than later. Dunno whether this is true or not, but Debt-Free Playbook posts a story that is funnier than a bi-gawd. Go to the source (which appears on DFP’s page) for even more wackiness.

Review: Blue Shoes and Happiness

by Alexander McCall Smith
Random House, Anchor Books
Paperback, $12.95

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

—John Adams to his son John Quincy Adams
Philadelphia, 1777

 

For quite a while, I’ve wanted to review books for Funny about Money. Thing is, I personally don’t much enjoy the how-to and self-help books other PF bloggers favor. Their authors rarely say anything new, what they do say is often shallow or downright wrong, and the books too often seem to exist primarily to promote the authors’ own wealth-building agenda.

One of Funny’s themes, however, is stress relief and control. No question about it: a good book makes a fine tool for relieving stress. And so that leads us out of the wilderness of self-improvement and into the sylvan glades of…yes! literature. That’s right: things that are actually fun to read.

Over the past few months and years, revisiting fiction has given me a great deal of pleasure and, exactly contrary to watching television, has deflected anxiety. What passes for entertainment on TV by and large is a murky flood of violence, lurid voyeurism, and angst. Even the news programs, infotainment that I refuse to honor with the name of news but instead call Play-Nooz (back-formation from Play-Doh), consist almost 100 percent of violence, voyeurism, and angst. So I’ve taken to leaving the television off in the evenings and reading a good book instead. Personal finance hook: no cable bill means big savings for your budget.

My own taste in fiction, and so the kind of thing that will appear in these reviews, runs to the intelligible. While I respect and honor ground-breaking creativity, some of the postmodernists are about as readable as a (mind-numbing!) self-help book. Now that I’m a certified escapee from graduate school, I no longer feel compelled to read things that leave my head spinning. Carlos Fuentes I enjoy; Salman Rushdie gives me vertigo. So, you’re not likely to hear about The Enchantress of Florence here, not anytime soon. Lately my taste has grown so debased I’ve developed a fondness for certain pulp novels: hence my delight at being paid (can you imagine?) to read page proofs for a publisher of mystery stories.

This brings me to my favorite author of mysteries, Alexander McCall Smith, who has produced three series of novels. What I most love about the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, among which Blue Shoes and Happiness numbers, is that almost nothing happens in these stories. No murders, no tortures, no kidnappings and cold-sweat searches for missing victims buried in living graves, no rapes, no mutilations. The few deaths that occur take place off-screen. Set in Botswana, the novels trace the lives and doings of Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of the highly unlikely but strangely believable Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency; Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, one of Africa’s finest mechanics and owner of the garage on whose premises the detective agency resides; Motholeli and Puso, the two orphans they adopt; Grace Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s doughty (not to say “dowdy”) assistant; and their various clients, friends, relatives, and hangers-on. The action unrolls like the plot of a genteel soap opera: slow, elegant, and endlessly entertaining.

The exotic locale allows Smith, who was born in Rhodesia, to tell us about rural lifeways in Africa and the issues currently facing emerging nations on that continent, at the same time addressing what it means to be human. Rra Matekoni (Mma evidently means something like “Ms.” and Rra, “Mr.”) suffers from clinical depression, Mma Ramotswe has survived an abusive marriage, the intelligent Mma Makutsi struggles with her own sweet nerdiness. As these people wend their way along the routes of their lives, we see all the facets of human nature-kindness and cruelty, evil and good, generosity and greed, energy and sloth, moral strength and dissoluteness-revealing themselves in the passing panorama.

The stately pace gives Smith opportunities to display his considerable writing style, especially when the action pauses while the characters take time to contemplate their lives and circumstances. These extraordinary passages will be lost, I expect, in the TV series, soon to spin off the books onto BBC in the United Kingdom and HBO in the United States. Consider, for example:

Mma Ramotswe and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went home for lunch at Zebra Drive, something they enjoyed doing when work at the garage permitted. Mma Ramotswe liked to lie down for twenty minutes or so after the midday meal. On occasion she would drop off to sleep for a short while, but usually she just read the newspaper or a magazine. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni would not lie down, but liked to walk out in the garden under the shade netting, looking at his vegetables. Although he was a mechanic, like most people in Botswana he was, at heart, a farmer, and he took great pleasure in this small patch of vegetables he coaxed out of the dry soil. One day, when he retired, they would move out to a village, perhaps to Mochudi, and find land to plough and cattle to tend. Then at last there would be time to sit outside on the stoep with Mma Ramotswe and watch the life of the village unfold before them. That would be a good way of spending such days as remained to one; in peace, happy, among the people and cattle of home. It would be good to die among one’s cattle, he thought, with their sweet breath on one’s face and their dark, gentle eyes watching right up to the end of one’s journey, right up to the edge of the river.

We want stress relief? We want a true definition of wealth? Well, there they are.

This lovely, quiet imagery is directly followed by a scene full of tension as a new client appears at the Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency.

In Blue Shoes and Happiness, the people proceed through the small dramas of their lives, revealing their qualities of character along the way. Mma Makutsi finds a lover, though whether she will attain the happiness she has worked so hard to earn seems in question; Mma Ramotswe and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni rescue a foundering soul and end up with an assistant mechanic who wants to be an assistant detective; clients bring tales of rascalry to be cleared up. As in all the Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency stories, little happens and much happens.

It’s in fiction that reality and wisdom reside. We humans explore the truths of our lives in the stories we tell. I’ll take Alexander McCall Smith over Dave Ramsey, any day!