LAKE MACBRIDE— Budgeting. We think of spreadsheets and calculations that determine our balance sheet— and ensuring there is enough action in the works to produce enough income to pay expenses. In December, it’s about considering this year and preparing for the next, and it is not all about finances.
What shall we do next year? Once some answers are framed, the budget process begins. Two things are clear this holiday season. Our household is in better shape this year than last, and there are opportunities beyond basic survival.
Our household relies upon a mix of part-time jobs to fund expenses. I outlined my approach in 2013, and the basic framework is unchanged. Where the financial budget is lacking will be made up by new adventures in part-time work.
This year’s challenge is how to use time.
As readers will recognize, my time has been spent gardening, writing, cooking and in part-time paid work. This won’t change. However, there are some new things on the horizon.
We need to downsize, and there is a full-time job just doing that. Next year will partly be about that.
I want a book to sell at speaking events. Framing topics, writing and editing one is high on the list. Most likely it will be a collection of past writing, which fits in with downsizing.
We moved to Big Grove in 1993, and our house is showing wear. It is time to make a list of projects and work on some of them.
While this isn’t much of a plan, it is a framework of how to spend a year. That is a beginning to proper budgeting.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Part of writing a newspaper article is waiting for people to get back.
Phone calls are a mixed bag. I prefer email or text message responses because they allow me to consider my questions—and the subject to consider answers—before hitting the send button.
My stories are somewhat uncoupled from time so I like to get solid quotes which shine the best possible light on people interviewed.
I have half a dozen queries out, and it’s as far as I can go. I wait.
This year’s holiday season is already unlike any previous. Mom went in for surgery last week, and our daughter was here over the weekend because of her work schedule. It’s still eight days until Christmas.
Our decorations are up ahead of schedule, and that’s a good thing. With all of the family visits more regimented and some finished, there will be time to do other positive things.
My first order for garden seeds shipped on Monday. The Winterbor kale is back ordered, which is better than last year, when it wasn’t even available. The garden will get a good start, as I already have the starter soil and trays.
My first two responses have arrived via email, so I had better get back to my newspaper article.
LAKE MACBRIDE— The idea of a forty hour work week and regular, scheduled workdays, including a Friday until Sunday weekend, was blown up a long time ago.
Beyond reason, I continue to long for le weekend, as elusive as it has become. Longing overcoming reality in a way common in the consumer enclaves where life often finds us.
Any more, I work every day, and enjoy almost all of it.
The unfinished work of my generation has been reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. What has changed is the weapons systems have aged, support structures have become calcified, and each year we understand new ways nuclear weapons could be the end of everything we know about life on Earth. Whether by design, by accident, or madness, a nuclear explosion would have devastating consequences for humanity and must be avoided at all costs.
“There have been two conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in the last year and a half, in Oslo, Norway, and in Nayarit, Mexico,” Gunnar Westberg wrote on the IPPNW Peace and Health Blog. “At the latter 146 states participated. The conclusion was that any use of nuclear weapons would have such severe humanitarian consequences that they must be abolished completely.”
There will be a third conference in Vienna Dec. 8-9. The good news is two of the nine nuclear states will be in attendance for the first time, the U.S. and U.K. The rest of the news is the U.S. is committed to a methodology for arms control based upon enforcement of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Therefore, besides many chats over Viennese pastry and coffee, only limited work toward abolition seems possible.
In my early sixties, I can still work on nuclear abolition. But what about after I am gone? When living memory of the dawn of the nuclear age and its aftermath recedes, what then?
Our descendants will be left with an aging nuclear complex, the purpose of which has been in doubt for decades already. If current government operations continue, it will continue to be five minutes until midnight.
Considering the doomsday threat, talk about le weekend seems futile. Better get back to work.
LAKE MACBRIDE— My resistance to shopping broke down yesterday. I stopped at a national chain drug store and bought a packet of razor blades and two cans of shaving cream. I was almost out. By the way, when did razor blades move to $2.29 each? Rhetorical question.
In a life without television it can be quiet in the house. After returning from a two-hour shift at the warehouse, I crashed and slept for four hours.
While preparing dinner, I turned on the radio to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, as I have been wont to do since I learned about the program in the late 1970s.
In 2011, there was a clamor about the underwriter Allianz, a German financial services company, and their underwriting of A Prairie Home Companion. They are said to have collaborated with the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida) introduced legislation that would allow Holocaust survivors to sue Allianz.
“(Ros-Lehtinen) has launched a letter-writing campaign aimed at blocking the insurer from advertising with any U.S. media until it pays off all Holocaust survivors’ life insurance claims. During World War II, Allianz insured concentration camp facilities and sent money to the Nazis instead of rightful Jewish beneficiaries,” according to the congresswoman’s website.
“Allianz is no ordinary insurance conglomerate,” Ros-Lehtinen wrote. “This company was involved in one of the greatest atrocities in recent history and has gone to great lengths to dodge acceptance of responsibility for its actions.”
And I thought Allianz was bad underwriting for A Prairie Home Companion because of their financing of nuclear weapons.
Last night they were promoting Martinelli’s Gold Medal Sparkling Apple Cider, a product I sold at the warehouse last Tuesday. It is that weird blend of familiarity, and the unspoken meaning of underwriters that garners my attention as I listen to the radio program. If I had left the house quiet, I wouldn’t have been thinking about that—not at all. A Prairie Home Companion could pull the plug on Allianz, and should. I listen, as old habits can be comforting even if they aren’t the best for us.
What else is there to do while preparing dinner in the kitchen?
LAKE MACBRIDE— We rush toward the new year with hope. Imperfect, we still try and that is something. Some would say it is everything.
On a piece of scratch paper I estimated 2015 income from known sources. The information was to apply for a tax credit during the open enrollment period in the Health Care Marketplace. Our budgeted income is about the same as 2014 actual, although with fewer part time jobs. We qualified for a tax credit of $13,224, which will actually be a payment by the federal government to a health insurance company.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been under relentless criticism and legal challenge, and it’s far from over. The Muscatine Journal published an article that explained the current case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this spring or summer.
“The court has decided to hear a case that questions the legality of federal subsidies for private health insurance purchased via the federal government under the new health care law,” Erin Murphy wrote. Depending upon what the court decides, the tax credits like mine may be on the chopping block for some 24,000 Iowans.
If the subsidy is eliminated, and lawmakers take no corrective action, it means I would have to find more part time work to produce weekly take-home pay of $254.31 to pay for health insurance. It would be the equivalent of working another 30-hour per week job at about $8.50 per hour.
In 2011, Medicare cost $549.1 billion to provide services for 48.7 million beneficiaries, according to the Medicare Newsgroup. That works out to $11,275.15 per year, or $1,949 less than the tax credit we were provided in the Marketplace. It seems doubtful a politician could connect the dots, but wouldn’t it be cheaper to lower the eligibility age for Medicare and pay less to insurance companies? That makes sense, so what was I thinking?
I’ll complete the process of choosing a plan before the Dec. 15 deadline, and it looks like we’ll keep our current policy. Then we’ll wait and see what the high court does.
And we’ll still be trying to sustain a life in a turbulent world.
LAKE MACBRIDE— A dusting of snow lay on the driveway as I walked to the road to get the newspaper. I breathed the cool night air for a few moments. The carrier had not arrived.
Returning to the kitchen, I turned off the boiling pan of eggs—protein for our ovo-lacto vegetarian holiday feast planned to include wild rice, sweet potatoes, lettuce salad, steamed broccoli, homemade baked beans, a relish tray and an apple crisp. There will be leftovers for days.
Except for the lettuce, the meal will be made from pantry ingredients, the result of shopping, but also of canning, growing, bartering and pickling. It’s a sign of the times.
We spent our thirties through fifties traveling for Thanksgiving, but no more. It’s just the two of us. We won’t even travel the three miles to town where one of the churches offers a free Thanksgiving meal for all comers.
In the quiet of each hour we will plan and cook the meal, serve it, and then clean the living room to put up the holiday decorations. Fit retreat from a bustling life among people.
A day to be thankful for what peace there is and the quiet fallen snow beneath predawn air.
BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP— There was trouble last night at the cemetery, the first such trouble since I was elected township trustee.
It had to do with who could be buried in whose plot, and the trustee who coordinates plot sales and burials wanted to discuss the issue. The funeral is Friday, so no time for dalliance. We are meeting at 8:30 a.m.
Two years into my term, being a township trustee has provided a steady stream of learning about our community. There has been time to consider things, and almost no controversy—just repeated expression of wills about what should get done and how. Any conflicts that surfaced were quickly resolved.
I’m confident we will figure this one out.
Yesterday it was shown that Mary Landrieu did have 59 votes to proceed on Keystone XL, and that’s all she had. The bill overriding the executive process on evaluation and approval of the project now goes into the dustbin of the 113th Congress. It likely will be back next congress.
I spent part of the last two days transcribing testimony to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide particularly.
“I began my career as a summer intern at EPA 42 years ago under what has euphemistically become known as Russell House One,” Dianne Dillon Ridgely said. “I was a 19-year old kid. And what is most dramatic is much of what we addressed that summer—in terms of air pollution, in terms of the public’s engagement on power production—are exactly the same things, particularly in terms of coal, that we are still addressing and fighting 42 years later, and to me that is really a sad commentary.”
Ridgley is a 42-year veteran of governmental action (or inaction) on clean air and clean water, having been appointed by Presidents Clinton, Bush 41 and Bush 43 to international delegations to address environmental issues. We’re still addressing them. There is hope the EPA’s actions won’t be blocked by the 114th Congress, something the presumed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell indicated is high on his to-do list. Time will tell, but I believe we are on the right side of history regardless of what the Congress does.
My last workday at the local paper was Sunday. It will feel a little weird to be able to focus on my writing on the weekends instead of proof reading the paper. The bucket of part time paid jobs is down to three, and one of those is finished the second week in December. When the number surged to eight last summer, it was too much to juggle. Having found a bottom, the goal for next year is to keep what remains, and use it as a base. In addition, I will seek paid writing jobs and temporary positions and opportunities that can add a few C-notes to the treasury each month. What remains is that I work to support my ability to write.
Hope against hope, I want to get out in the yard and mulch the leaves, and shorten the grass. For that to happen, the snow needs to melt, the yard dry out, and half a day of warmer temperatures roll in. In these days of crazy weather, that is possible, however improbable. That’s where this Wednesday finds me.
Half of our household budget is paid from wages earned by working in the warehouse. It’s a constant worry and last night highlighted a couple of things.
Up all night coughing due to a cold, or something, I called off today. My worries were about 1). being sick, 2). leaving my superior in the lurch by my absence, and 3). losing the $50 or so, I would have earned today. Each took its mental toll as I rolled and coughed and finally called off around 4 a.m. so the voice mail would be waiting when she arrived to open the office.
It was a reasonable decision, as the condition might worsen had I gone in and worked on my feet, giving people breaks. Coughing and hacking over food samples can never be good, so in the end everyone was served. I suppose the worry serves a purpose too.
After my call, the display on my mobile phone showed the outside temperature was 22 degrees—the first hard frost. A friend wrote:
“I was close to tearful about all my reddish orange raspberries that would have been perfect for harvest in just say three more days. Last year they were completely done a few days before any freeze. Sigh. It was a banner year for raspberries and I’ve loved them all! But I guess harvesting berries past Oct. 31 is really asking for climate change!”
So the season spins, its markers passing rapidly, but recognizably as we tread on in life’s journey. At 1:30 p.m., I had stopped coughing enough to feel ready to sit in my writer’s seat and get to work—tissue box at the ready. I turned from worry to no worries.
Some people worry about a Hillary Clinton presidency, but not me. Few people have the breadth of experience she does, and fewer still focus on the advancement of human rights the way she does. This week she was at the Hamburg Inn No. 2 in Iowa City with Rep. Bruce Braley to have a pie shake—and be seen there. Specifically, a chocolate-bourbon-pecan-flavored pie shake, according to media. It was a sign of something.
I finished her recent memoir, “Hard Choices,” in between coughing spells this morning.
“Now, more than ever, the future is very much on my mind,” she wrote in the epilogue. “Over the past year, as I’ve traveled around our country once again, the one question I’m asked more than any other is: Will I run for President in 2016? The answer is I haven’t decided yet.”
Far be it from me to opine on the matter of whether she should run for office again. But if she does, positives outweigh negatives, by a distance. In sooth, she has no competition among the parade of potential 2016 aspirants testing the political waters in Iowa this election cycle. That is, if experience matters.
If experience doesn’t matter, as a nation we have lost our way.
In my self-imposed quarantine, I’m hoping a couple of things. 1). that I recover my heath well enough to work at the warehouse tomorrow, as we need the income, 2). that Iowans reject Joni Ernst on Tuesday, and send Bruce Braley to the U.S. Senate, and 3). that Hillary Clinton gives fair consideration to throwing her hat in the ring for 2016.
Hopefully that pie-shake reminded her that Iowans are not so bad.
LAKE MACBRIDE—Five consecutive days without home broadband has been challenging. My work relies on being connected.
While taking stock of this dependency, which borders on addiction, unnecessary concerns drop easily from view. Instead there is time to contemplate the 4 a.m. southern cloud formation, bright against a sky sprinkled full of stars.
It has been a chance to catch up with where I’m bound.
With nervous apprehension, I await the cable guy, who’s coming between 8 a.m. and noon.
I have become Everyman.
A killer frost has been delayed. The tomatoes, peppers and kale continue to grow, albeit more slowly. Today’s harvest included some of each.
The Bangkok peppers have been good for dehydrating and making red pepper flakes. More than a year’s worth is inside to be processed.
The deciduous trees have dropped most of the leaves they will this fall, so it is time to mow and mulch them: one last cleanup of our wild-grown yard.
There will be much more to write, but for now, waiting on the cable guy, these few words will have to do.
LAKE MACBRIDE— The thought of mowing is pushed back until the deciduous trees shed their leaves. Pools of yellow, red, brown and variegated leaves rest silently around tree trunks all around the neighborhood as geese fly overhead. The next step toward winter and its bitter cold.
Yesterday’s options were many—events with politicians Dave Loebsack, Monica Vernon, Rand Paul and Joni Ernst—but I remained working at home. The morning after, I felt better for the decision.
In the last two weeks of the political campaigns, Ernst submitted a Freedom of Information request to a couple of Democratic county auditors requesting detailed information about election procedures. Who knows what motivated the request, but it’s a close election, and if it goes to the wire, expect legal action—not unlike what happened in Minnesota when Al Franken was first elected.
I met my editor at the Press Citizen for coffee in Iowa City. The freelance work for the newspaper was an unexpected bonus as the year moves toward the holidays and its hope of spring renewal. They are short three of six reporters and need help covering stories. Once they get staffing filled, the number of articles I write will decrease. As farmers say, it is time to make hay while the sun shines and I expect to ask for two to three articles per week.
Apple processing began in earnest with filling the dehydrator with slices. The leaves have begun to turn on the Red Delicious apple tree, so it’s time to pick the high apples. Will get the ladder out later this morning. An apple crisp is in the works, as well as fresh juice.
The end of year crunch is here. Fortunately I have learned to come up for air from time to time in the rush of events. Something needed to sustain a life on the Iowa prairie.
Journey Home 
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