Tag Archives: budget

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. A deferred milestone. I thought I was on track to hit the next weight milestone – 200 pounds even, or down 130 – on or about my birthday. Although I’ve started slowly creeping down again, the previous three weeks where I held all things equal has pretty much guaranteed I can’t get there from here unless I develop a pretty nasty stomach bug. It’s disappointing, of course. I was hoping to sit down to my traditional birthday lunch of crabcakes and hushpuppies and proceed to getting back to a “maintenance” level of eating. That feels out of reach. But I’m still damned well planning to have the crab cakes and hushpuppies.

    2. Foreign aid debate. You know what one of the most successful bits of foreign policy of the post World War II era? Yeah, that would be when the United States poured out absolute shiploads of cash, material, and expertise on Europe and rebuilt a shattered continent. It turns out prosperous liberal democracies bound together by deep ties of trade tend not to try to kill each other nearly so often as they did when international diplomacy was a zero-sum game. The weight of American troops and weapons arguably won the war, but it was the Marshall Plan that won the peace. It’s a pity that Americans consistently refuse to remember their own history when we’re talking about relatively paltry sums in the contemporary foreign aid budget. Every scrap of progress we can make by throwing money at the problem is far less expensive than anything that happens when we need to get involved kinetically. 

    3. Walking. Gods, even with the latest in listening technology, walking is just a deadly dull way to spend 30 or 40 minutes every day. Yes, the scenery in the neighborhood is nice. Sometimes I get to see neighbors doing something stupid in full view of the sidewalk. Aside from occasionally getting to interface with the local wildlife, I’m sorry, but there just isn’t much to recommend it. Living at the far end of the dead end street, there are only so many ways to make the path different… and after six months, I’ve trod all those down multiple times each week already. Look, I’ll keep doing it… under protest and purely because the doc says I must… but you’ll never convince me that there isn’t a more interesting or entertaining use to those 30 or 40 minutes of every day that isn’t called off on account of weather. 

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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    1. The U.S. House of Representatives. I was really counting on the House of Representatives to completely shit the bed and shut the government down at the end of this week. I mean I don’t want them to close up shop forever, but a week or two furlough over the Thanksgiving holiday would have been some much appreciated time off for which I’d have ended up getting paid for eventually anyway. Alas, the House managed to drop back and punt… and do it without waiting until the last possible moment. It’s not that kind of performance I should find impressive, but given all their recent fuckery, it’s honestly surprising.

    2. Timing. The six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years are, in my experience, pretty much dead space. Sure, technically there are a fair number of work days in there, but the universal consensus is that the vast number of bureaucrats are focused on other things. Just now, the week before I launch into my five day Thanksgiving weekend, I’m feeling the siren’s call of a near total lack of motivation. Yes, of course I’ll keep plugging away at whatever crosses my desk, but it’s undeniable that my annual holiday lack of motivation has arrived early this year… and it’s only annoying because some of my distinguished colleagues haven’t arrived there yet themselves. I question their timing.

    3. Cold. For most of my adult life I’ve been thermally protected by the extra weight I’ve carried around. With the recent arrival of cold weather combined with some appreciable weight loss, I find that for the first time in memory, I’m constantly cold instead of running just a little bit warm. It’s a predictable side effect, but I’m finding it more unpleasant than I expected.

    It’s what happens when the giants are all dead…

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    The Republican controlled House of Representatives has about five days to prove that they can find their ass with both hands and a flashlight before the government runs out of money. They’re just coming off a three-day weekend so who at least they should be well rested while they do whatever passes for “work” in the halls of the United States Congress.

    I’ve been at this a while. I’ve been through shut downs, furloughs, and an endless amount of legislative fuckery. We’ve been down this road so often that a previous Congress put in place a little section of public law that guarantees government employees back pay for any time spent sitting on the beach during a shutdown. Knowing the back pay is coming doesn’t quite offset not getting a regularly scheduled check, but it does help take the edge off… Not to mention a three or four week shutdown would get me out of a couple projects that are lining up to be a real pain in the ass.

    Make no mistake, a government shutdown is bad. It’s bad for people who work for the government. It’s bad for the army of contractors who won’t be receiving back pay. It’s bad for travelers, people who eat food, or take medication, or want to visit a National Park. Perhaps more importantly, it makes the Congress look like incredibly huge douche nozzles who are incapable of doing one of the very few things the Constitution identifies as part of their job description.

    I don’t have much faith in Kevin McCarthy’s leadership based on his past performance. I have even less faith in the hard right extremist wackjob wing of his party not standing around cheering while the whole thing burns. We are in a problematic era of republican government and I’m increasingly convinced that we’ve gotten precisely the kind of government we collectively deserve. 

    I grew up in an older world of political deal making where compromise was part of what kept the great machine running. Getting half a loaf simply meant the other half was left to go after the next time. The great pols of the 20th century understood that… and the system, with all its faults, worked well enough to do big things – like build an interstate highway system, land men on the moon, and win a long Cold War. 

    It seems the giants of American politics who could manage that kind of heavy lift are all dead and we’ve been left with third stringers who can’t even be bothered to keep the lights on. 

    Flying trees…

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    There was a formerly magnificent oak tree in the back yard that was dying for as long as I’ve had the house. Its leaves always looked a little battered and brittle and its canopy considerably thinner than its immediate neighbors. Four years ago one of its main limbs plunged into the yard while I was eating dinner on a summer Saturday night. Anyone under it would have had an awfully bad day.

    That was worrisome, but the rest of the tree looked to be in decent enough shape and without any more obviously dead branches. This spring’s drought, it seems, was more than the old girl could take. It stood there showing shades of nothing but brown since sometime in early June. Once this particular tree came down, it was obvious that sometime in the last decade it was lightning struck. The scorch marks around the top of the trunk were plain – and it had a six-inch hollow from nearly root to crown. It was going to come down sooner rather than later whether it was planned or not. 

    A dead tree in the woods isn’t necessarily cause for worry in and of itself. This one, though, had a bit of an awkward lean to it. In that condition, I expect it could easily have toppled directly on seven or eight segments of split rail fence that I didn’t especially want to replace. It also overhung one of Jorah’s favorite spots in the yard. I like the idea of replacing him even less than the thought of replacing a big section of fencing. 

    That’s all a lot of lead up to say that I hired an arborist to deal with what was well beyond my own scope and abilities as a homeowner. Over the course of a day, his team took down the dead oak as well as a living one that hung precariously over the garage. They also cleared out several smaller trees that all overhung my bedroom. Due to their problematic locations, nearly every cut was tied off and hoisted by crane – some to be disposed of naturally in the woods and some to be hauled off site.

    Each lift weighed in somewhere around 3000 pounds according to the crane operator. Having a ton and half of dead weight flying over the house all afternoon was, in a word, unsettling. It absolutely unlocked a brand new variety of homeowner fear. I hate the idea of taking down perfectly healthy trees, but after seeing how big these oaks are once they were on the ground, the thought of any of them landing on the house is nightmare fuel. 

    If you’re envisioning a small project, I’m not describing it properly. In fact, it’s likely only the first third of what we’ll end up doing over the next two or three years to beat back the trees that have encroached on the house since the building site was cleared 23 years ago. This year we took on the worst offenders – those trees or parts thereof that were deemed most likely to fall directly on my head.

    It’s not the home improvement project I had planned to take on or budgeted for this year, but once you’ve committed to having a crane set up in the front yard, it feels like you should make the most of it being there. At least I know again this year why I won’t be going anywhere that even hints of a vacation. Hopefully the tree guy at least goes somewhere fun. 

    The end off the cuff budgeting…

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    I’ve never been much of a budgeter. That’s not to say I don’t keep an eye on cash flow and know more or less what’s coming in and what’s going out. However, sitting down and putting together a real pen and ink budget has all the appeal of a back alley root canal.

    Having said that, I couldn’t help but notice that the spate of vet bills coming through these last four months has put more than a little bit of strain on my mental accounting. In fact, keeping the accounts balanced put me in a highly unusual (and disagreeable) position of either needing to sell assets or take on debt to float the bills until inflow caught up with outflow.

    I’m a collector by nature, so the process of acquiring things has always come easy. I’m less comfortable when the time comes to sell some of those things off – even if I picked them up originally with a vague plan that someday I may need to convert them to cash if I ever found myself pinched. I know many people enjoy that side of the process as much as they do acquiring things in the first place. Not me. I tend to acquire and then hold on grimly.

    With the current, almost punitive rate of interest on consumer borrowing, though, letting a few things go was the lesser of two evils. Maybe it’s only lesser because I know full well I’ll end up buying them back whenever the opportunity presents itself in the future.

    The point of all that is to say I’m finally coming around to the idea of putting a bit more academic rigor into my household budgeting process. The personal finance gurus would probably disagree, but step one is funding a much more robust “self-insurance” account for future veterinary expenses – the one thing I can find that consistently blasts gaping holes in my operating budget. After that, everything else just sort of takes care of itself… or at least that’s what the numbers seem to be telling me.

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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    1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 36 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 36 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

    2. Vacation. Time off is supposed to be restful and restorative. Maybe it was in the moment, but it’s sure as hell not feeling anything like that now. Whatever positive effects there were wore plumb away within 30 or 45 minutes of signing on and downloading my hundred or so missed messages… and then we were off and running with an endless stream of random questions, meetings that didn’t meet, and trying not to let my facial expression say everything that my mouth shouldn’t. Once again, we’re down to being motivated entirely by the knowledge that I would well and truly suck at living under a bridge. 

    3. Dog food. Jorah eats a pretty middle of the road diet of dry kibble. It’s not some kind of wacky raw, freeze dried, refrigerated, new age-y stuff and it’s not the 50 pound bag of whatever Ol’ Roy serves up passing as dog food. With that said, my regular Chewy order just shipped and I got an email thanking me for my $80 purchase. That’s a 35 pound bag of food that I distinctly remember being able to purchase not terribly long ago for about $50. I get the whole inflationary environment – and probably only notice the dog’s food because I only buy it once every five weeks or so instead of my own grocery bills that wash through, mostly unnoticed, on a weekly basis. I didn’t have the heart to look at what the next shipment of the cat’s canned food is going to cost. It’ll be just as eye-watering and will be just as much a “must pay” budget item. If it turns out I ever go bankrupt, rest assured, it will be on the back on the expenses accrued to sustain these furry little bastards that live rent free in my home.

    Gutter related bullshit…

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    I’ve been fighting with the gutters on this house since more or less the first weekend I moved in. One of the very first things that needed doing was clearing out a 10- or 12-foot segment that wasn’t so much a tool for draining water as it was a prelude to a roof garden. Living in a house surrounded on three sides by 80-foot oaks, you learn to accept keeping gutters clean is a never-ending bit of work. For me it has meant twice a year professional cleanings and periodic unclogging as needed in between.

    The place came pre-installed with basic plastic gutter guards. By the time I took up residence, some were broken or missing or warped out of shape and making nuisances of themselves. At best they were a 50% solution, but I limped along with them, replacing individual pieces as needed. This year, during various high wind and heavy rain events, it seems whole sections of the rainwater management system have just given up the ghost. This past Sunday I had water pouring over the top of the gutters in at least three spots. That’s not ideal.

    Hiring someone to, at a minimum, install a new set of metal leaf guards was near the top of next year’s home improvement list. Given that the existing gutters were clogged Sunday evening about 36 hours after I had cleaned them out and verified that they were running properly, getting resolution on this is now formally a “this year” problem. Getting through what’s left of the fall and then a long, cold winter with the current set up feels untenable.

    So, instead of schlepping up the ladder and replacing another series of broken or mutilated bits of plastic, I’ve done what I do best – I hired a professional to rip it all down, give me brand spanking new larger gutters and cap them with perforated metal covers. It wasn’t a planned expense for this year, but getting it done right instead of applying another patch to patched patches is probably the better use of time and money. Sure, it’ll still need some periodic maintenance, but I’m cautiously optimistic that this could be the beginning of the end of seven years of gutter related bullshit.

    I should file this solidly under “the joy of home ownership.”

    Congressional ineptitude…

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    It’s that magical time of year when thoughts turn inevitably to the non-zero percent likelihood of a government shutdown. This stems from the inability of the United States Congress to pass a basic federal budget any time in the last 15 years. Yes, for 75% of my career, your federal government has been funded through makeshift resolutions rather than via the actual federal budgeting process. It’s an arrangement that has led to a number of furloughs and government shutdowns while our beloved representatives in Congress attempt to find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.

    Now personally, with all of the elected branches of government controlled by members of the Democratic Party, I find it hard to believe they’d shoot themselves in the foot by failing to even pass a continuing resolution to fund government operations for FY23. Although I find it hard, I don’t discount the possibility completely. Having “full control” of the Congress over the last two years has certainly highlighted the Democrat’s inability to get along among themselves. Having one or two of their members bolt during negotiation is certainly well within the realm of the possible. 

    In the past, a government shutdown meant most of us went home and sat around wondering if there was going to be a provision for back pay when the doors eventually opened again. In my experience, the answer was always yes, but it was never a certainty until a special provision was passed allowing for it. Thanks to a new provision in law, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, the question has been permanently resolved. Uncle Sam is now required to pay his employees in full at the end of a shutdown, regardless of whether they were sent home or not.

    With that delightful piece of legislation now enshrined in law, my level of concern at the potential for the U.S. Congress to become the world’s largest circular firing squad has been almost completely eliminated. Sure, it’s bad from a PR perspective, it holds up our representative democracy to all sorts of mockery, and it makes our most senior elective leaders look ragingly incompetent… but that’s pretty much the opinion I have of them already. At least this way I know I’ll be getting paid. Eventually. So, bring on the Congressional ineptitude. 

    What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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    1. New food. I’ve got maybe 18 or 20 basic meals that I can make with my eyes closed. They’re reliably tasty and lead to plenty of leftovers. The trouble is, at some point, a guy gets tired of eating the same 20 basic meals and then tries to branch out with new recipes. In and of itself that’s not a bad thing. The real injury comes after the cooking, when you sit down and the dinner table and realize that although the meal may be nutritious and even edible, you just don’t like it. I think the biggest reason I keep falling back on the tried-and-true meals that I’m a bit burned out on is that the other side of the coin is that two out of three new meals attempted turns out being something I’ll choke down because it’s hot and ready, but the remainder of which ends up being tossed into the woods when I clean out the refrigerator. With the cost of groceries and the time investment to actually cook, new and different increasingly feels like a high-risk venture.

    2. Alternative Pay. The president has issued his alternative pay proposal for fiscal year 2023. At 4.6%, it’s the biggest yearly raise I’ve seen in 19 years of service. It’s a number that would feel impressive if it weren’t just half of what the official rate of inflation was this year. Having lived through the years of furlough and pay freezes, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but given the prevailing circumstances of the overall economic situation, I’m also not going to hire a brass band to celebrate the “generosity” of the Biden administration.

    3. Bicyclists. I don’t have any intrinsic problem with bicycles. Some of the people who ride them, however, are deeply suspect. The two who decided to cross the Susquehanna River at 4:15 on a Friday afternoon obviously had no regard for their own health and safety. Yes, what they did was nominally legal, but it seems to me it’s a case of knowing the difference between the things you can do and the things you should do. Taking up a full lane of a heavily traveled and narrow bridge during peak commuting time was patently dangerous to them and to everyone who had to unexpectedly try to avoid them. The only positive I could see from when I finally managed to shift lanes and get around them, is that the look on their faces made it abundantly clear they were aware of having made a seriously questionable life choice.

    Weak in size and spirit…

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    The occupant of the White House is a member of the Democratic Party. Members of the Democratic Party also constitute the majority, though a slim one, in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This week they’ll be struggling mightily to pass monumentally large spending bills, not crash headlong into the debt ceiling, and keep the lights on at federal departments and agencies across the country.

    One thing I think we’re going to have to give up now is the illusion that our legislative process is broken because one party or another is made up entirely of obstructionists who live to say “no.” When one of those parties holding all the reigns of power is still struggling or fails to get their agenda passed, the fiction of blaming the opposition party is awfully hard to sustain.

    If the party in power fails to pass signature portions of their own president’s agenda or fails to gin up the votes for their own spending priorities, or can’t manage that most basic of Congressional functions – passing the federal budget – that tells me not only is the majority weak in size, but also weak in spirit. If the Congressional Democrats can’t get the job done when they hold all the reigns, they’re ripe to be picked off in the 2022 election cycle.

    So as it turns out both of our dominate political parties are bad. One because it will cheerfully burn the republic to the ground if it means they get to hang on to power and the other because they can’t find the matches with both hands and a flashlight.