Category: Lifestyle

HOW Much?

House & Home, Lifestyle

This one made me shake my head.

Chicago is one of the most expensive cities to reside in the United States, with Angel Reese revealing she’s also a victim of those high costs, as her WNBA salary does not cover her $8,000-a-month rent.

Oh, the poor thing.

This is something I happen to know quite a bit about, because as Longtime Readers will recall, I used to live in Chicago.

“But where did you live, Kim?  That makes a difference.”

Connie and I lived in a 10th-floor apartment in Lakeview, a few blocks from Wrigley Field, which afforded us views of both Lake Michigan to the east, and the city skyline to the south.

Dawn over Lake Michigan.


That’s the John Hancock Building in the distance on the left.  Both pics were taken on a glum fall day soon after we’d moved in.

The apartment itself was massive:  around 2,800 sq.ft (3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms), it also had a basement lockup storage unit, free use of the laundromat, also in the basement, and 18-hour/day garbage pickup from the trashcan outside the goods elevator out the back door.  It was also beautiful, with bay windows and solid brick.masonry walls which were so thick, they actually impeded the wifi signal.  There were only two apartments on each floor.

It was so beautiful that when we had a couple of clients over for drinks during a conference, one — a wealthy owner of a chain of grocery stores — looked over at his wife and said, “We could do this”, and she nodded in agreement.  It was truly a place to be proud of, and only the business need to move to Dallas after 9/11 got us out of there.

At the time (early 2000s), the monthly rent for this wonderful apartment was $3,700 and even with our combined incomes, the only way we could afford it was due to the fact that we’d sold both our cars when moving from the suburbs, and the resultant savings on car payments and insurance (about $1,200 a month) made our apartment affordable.  (And the proximity to both train- and bus routes, not to mention the ubiquitous Chicago cabs, made car ownership irrelevant and unnecessary.  On the few occasions when we needed a car — to venture out of state for a client meeting, for example — there was a Budget rental office four blocks away.)

Anyway, I went online and checked on the current (2024) rentals in that building, and they’ve gone up, all right:  to $4,200 per month, just over half of what that WNBA tart is being charged.

Which begs the question:  what kind of apartment is she living in, at that rent?

I don’t know, but I can guess: some swanky modern high-rise apartment in the Loop, Streeterville or Near North neighborhoods.  Or maybe even a lakeside penthouse apartment just north of the Golden Mile.  Whatever, it’s probably too big for her, and definitely not worth what she gets paid as a WNBA player.

The point about living in Chicago, as we discovered when we looked into it, is that yes, you can pay a lot of money to live in the city;  but if you just lower your expectations a little and make a small compromise here and there, you can find affordable digs a-plenty.

Our apartment in Lakeview was just such a compromise, and I think that everyone could agree that it was not too great a sacrifice to have made.

The 20-year-old Angel Reese has clearly never bothered to look into such a compromise because her several sponsorship deals pay the bills, and not her WNBA salary (which is less than a fifth of my and Connie’s joint income at the time).  In ten years’ time, her career at an end and the sponsorships having vanished, we’ll no doubt be reading about Angel Reese having to live in her car and eating dog food — unless, of course, she manages to snag some rich dude who can afford her.

Not the best outlook, but hey.  According to the article, she has a (paid) “financial advisor” who, on this basis, ought to be fired.

Upright & Locked Position

Health, Lifestyle

Via Insty (thankee, Squire), I saw this:

Avoiding couches and chairs might be a good way of keeping your back pain from getting worse, new research suggests.  Finnish researchers found that when people with back pain sat even a little less each day, their pain was less likely to progress over the next six months.

Well, yes, but it depends on your definition of “sitting”, and I’m not being Clintonian, here.

A couple of years before Connie discovered she had cancer, she had back problems — I mean serious back issues, along with crippling sciatica.  Basically, she had three back operations (I forget which, L1S2 or vice-versa), had one of those electrical shock thingies implanted in her butt (electrodes linked to her spinal and sciatic nerves) and of course, serious pain medication.

How had this happened?  Well, basically, as it was explained to us by her back doctor, Richard Guyer of the Texas Back Institute (the man who fixed Tiger Woods’s back), it was because her job was 95% sedentary.  But first, a little history lesson.

According to Guyer, the worst invention ever created by Man was the upright chair.  Basically, the human body was conditioned over millennia of development into two basic positions that could be held for hours on end:  standing erect and lying prone.  The first was for survival purposes (hunting, herding and farming) and rest (sleep).

What the chair did, over a relatively short period of time, was to force the body into a position it wasn’t designed for, which of course placed all sorts of strain onto it, and most especially into the back.  While early chairs (mostly stools and benches) did not encourage lengthy periods of being seated (upright backs and hard seats), the addition of cushions and the creation of non-physically active tasks (e.g. clerical) had the effect of making upright seating a little more comfortable but no less damaging to the spine.  In fact, the added length of time while seated speeded up the damage process.

This is why so many early clerical jobs took place in a standing position, by the way, hunched over tall lecterns instead of being seated at desks — it really helped, and many people in the modern era who have gone back to working in an upright position can testify to the improvement in their physical health thereby.

But what if you can’t stand up for long periods of time?  An aside:

In my case, a youth spent playing competitive sport had messed my knees up — to the point that when I went to an osteopath several years ago, he looked at my X-rays and asked whether I was in the flooring business, because they only time he’d ever seen knees in this condition was from patients who installed carpets for a living.  (I made a joke about it and said that I was on my third marriage, whereupon he laughed and said, “Oh well, that explains it.”)  But my knees were and are no joke — it’s the reason I qualify for “cripple” license plates, by the way, because I can walk a little distance with no rest and without pain, but thereafter I have to start popping pain pills like M&Ms.  My daily pain-free distance at the moment is about 100 yards, cumulatively — about the distance walking to and from the car across a large supermarket parking lot, and a long shopping trip in the supermarket itself.  After that, my knees seize up and I reach for the Tylenol.  But back to the main story…

Anyway, Dr. Guyer’s solution to both my and Connie’s problem was to eschew sitting upright altogether, or at least for any serious length of time.  But for her job (training system design and tech writing) and my writing, that was not possible.

The solution?  Anti-gravity or, as we used to call them, Laz-Y-Boy reclining chairs.

Connie’s back, as it turned out, was too far gone, although her recliner helped some.  In my case, with only a “serious” (as opposed to her “critical”) back issue, the effect was close to miraculous:  my decades-long back pain disappeared within a matter of days, and I could (and still can) remain seated all day without back pain.  (I do have to get up throughout the day for coffee, meals and the related nature calls, relax, so I’m not going to die of deep vein thrombosis.)

So yeah;  as the Finnish boffins claim, sitting down less will help alleviate back pain and -injury.  But if you have to remain seated, do so in a reclining position.  It really works.

Even if the lack of exercise causes you to get other problems, like a fat gut.

You all know how to fix that problem:  eat less, eat better and exercise.  Or pay through the nose for Ozempic, like I have.

Better Or Worse?

Lifestyle, Technology

I suppose enough time has passed since cell phones became cheap and therefore ubiquitous to ponder the question:  is life better with cell phones?  Denise Van Outen thinks not:

Denise Van Outen reckons smartphones have killed the fun of the hedonistic ’90s as revellers’ antics are now being recorded instead of remembered.

The 50-year-old actress and telly host made her name as one of the ballsiest women on TV more than a quarter of a century ago – partying with the likes of Sara Cox and Zoe Ball.

But the mum-of-one is now lamenting the loss of the ‘Cool Britannia’ decade – and blames the likes of Apple for sucking the joy out of life.She blasted: “We never had access to everything on our smartphone. So, you’d go out and you’d just be in the moment and really enjoy it. I remember going to the big festivals like Glastonbury and Reading and you wouldn’t have your phone with you, you wouldn’t be videoing anything.

“I think people are starting to see now that smartphones can be a hindrance and stop people actually enjoying themselves.”

“And I think we’re gradually getting to a stage where a lot of people… for example, if you’re going to a party – are putting on invites that it’s a ‘No phone policy’.

I dunno.  I find myself hopelessly conflicted about the whole cellular phone business.  Never mind an early adopter, I put off buying one of the things for years, until Connie actually forced me into getting one.  So I had a Nokia flip phone for years until my kids finally shamed me into getting a smartphone.

But maybe that’s just me.  As someone who guards his privacy fiercely (I know, this blog yadda yadda yadda), I don’t like being at someone else’s beck and call, and at least the advent of caller ID made things bearable because I could decide whether or not to take the call.

And cell phones — at least the smart ones — put in an appearance quite long after I’d semi-retired;  I cannot imagine having one in a workplace environment, and finding out that no matter where I happened to be, I was still in the office.

Ugh.

That said, there have been times that being connected to the outside world has had its advantages — a couple of emergencies, helping the kids out of a jam, etc. — so yes, there’s that.  And I can see that for some jobs (e.g. realtor) cell phones have been a tremendous help to productivity.  I remember going to the airport during the early 1990s (when I did most of my business travel) and feeling sorry for those souls who were glued to pay phones (remember them?), contacting clients, the office, family etc. in those few minutes before takeoff.  For them — the people whom Woody Allen in a rare moment of actual humor termed “connectivity assholes” — there’s no doubt that the cell phone has been a boon.

I remain unconvinced, however, that the conveeeenience of the cell phone has been that much of an improvement to society.  And I resent like hell the intrusiveness of the things, enabling the outside world to contact me whether or not I feel like being contacted at all, let alone by people I have no wish to communicate with (politicians, pollsters, scam artists etc.)

I’m not a Luddite by any stretch, by the way.  I embraced email, for example, with a vengeance and to this day I prefer to communicate by that method instead of a phone call.

But I’m a reluctant user of the phone — any phone, not just cell phones, mind you — so don’t expect me to sing its praises.

And the lovely Denise has that part right:  going out is a much better experience without a cell phone.  We all used to make fun of Japanese tourists who experienced their entire trip through the lens of their Pentax.

Now, of course, we are all Japanese, who have to record our every experience lest we forget it.

What bollocks.

Not Alone

Lifestyle

It’s a little sad.  I’ve always wanted to be, or at least stay in the middle class.  Screw the Commies and their lickspittles who sneer at the “bourgeoisie” and their “bourgeois values”;  I’m proud to espouse those values, if they mean things like hard work, a modest lifestyle, good education and aspirations to, well, just live comfortably.

But it seems that recently — thank you, Joe fucking Biden and your lickspittles — I’m no longer in that class.  Instead, I’m now working class.  And the realization thereof came to me as I was reading this article:

If things are hard for you and your family right now, please understand that you are not alone. Most of the country is in the exact same boat.

No kidding. We are managing — but only just — to keep our heads above water;  but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so.

In a desperate attempt to maintain their middle class lifestyles, millions upon millions of Americans have been taking on debt like never before, and as a result we are now facing an unprecedented consumer debt bubble.

We haven’t had to resort to that, with some very small exceptions, simply because we’ve cut back hugely on anything we consider non-essentials. But as costs of everything, especially essentials, have rocketed upwards, what that means is that we can’t pay down our small credit card debt to the extent we want, to where we can pay them off altogether.  (The last time we had a zero balance was sometime pre-Covid, pre-flood destruction.)

Hell, I hardly ever go to the range anymore, not because of the range fees (I have a soon-to-expire annual membership, thanks to an extremely generous Reader), but because I can’t afford the ammo anymore — and this despite having shall we say a well-stocked ammo locker.  I just want to keep my ammo stocks high, because you never know, right?

…and I can’t just shoot .22 LR forever.

Forget travel — and I mean local, forget international travel completely — not just because of the cost of accommodation on the road, but because I can’t afford a $60 charge at the gas pump every few hours.

Food… well, let’s just say it’s hamburger, rice ‘n beans, and not all at the same time, either.

Don’t get me started on other essential costs like electricity;  I’ve already talked about those price increases (around 50%, in case anyone’s forgotten).

In short, my standard of living is around that of a European bank teller, but without the state financial assistance that the Euros can fall back on.  Unlike many as discussed in the article, I refuse to “maintain” my middle-class standard of living by using credit cards because I know that at the end of that lies misery and ruin.  Been there, done that, won’t go there again.

I’m not telling you all this because I want money from y’all;  the annual appeal is only due in May next year.

No, I’m telling you because I am not the only one going through this.  I can’t help feeling that there’s an air of desperation in the air, because if I’m feeling it, there are probably thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people in similar circumstances to mine.

And I don’t see an end to it, either.  Even a Red Wave [snort]  in November 2024 isn’t going to help — hell, a lottery win is more likely than that.

A Day In My Life

Good Stuff, Lifestyle

Indulge me please, O Gentle Readers, while I recount my activities last Friday.  They were nothing special, but there were a couple of highlights.

Woke up a little late after a night which featured “episodic sleep” — other Olde Pharttes will know whereof I speak — and finally fell into some proper sleep at about 5am.

Got up, did the usual Morning Stuff (Rx, urination etc.) and staggered out of the bedroom to make the morning coffee.  Debated about the gin, decided against it as I’d taken New Wife out for a Birthday Dinner the night before, and drunk perhaps a leetle too much sangria.  (Everything in moderation, that’s me.)

Coffee in hand, I discovered lying on my keyboard an empty bottle of some female facial cleansing lotion, and a plaintive note asking me to get her a fresh bottle.

Excellent:  a reason to get out of the house and do some husbandly / housekeeping duties — some groceries, fill the car, nothing special.

On the way out of the apartment complex parking lot, I saw something unusual:  a decently-styled American car:  I think it was a Buick, but as far as I’m aware they (like Lincoln) don’t make passenger sedans anymore, and the badge was too small for me to make the model out, whatever it was, but then again I’m not in the market for anything like that so I pootled out over the irritating speed bumps [1,000-word angry rant omitted].

Decided on Wal-Mart, simply because they’re just up the road and as I said, I needed to refill the Tiguan and their gas is reasonably priced.

I turned left across the traffic, and noted that there was an oncoming car just down the road, but the speed limit is 35mph, so plenty of room.  Except that he wasn’t doing 35 or anything close to it, so he swerved out of my lane and rocketed past me, shaking his fist (!) as he went by.

I had one of my quiet conversations at that point:  “I’m sorry;  did I make you late for your appointment at the next traffic light?”

As it happened, I didn’t;  but he was right on time for the cop doing the speed trap a block or so away.  So that ended well.

Went into Wal-Mart and got all the necessary things on the list — but before checking out, I stopped by the self-service lottery machine to make my weekly pension contribution.  As any fule kno, these contraptions do not give change, and all I had was a $20.

So I went over to the little in-house bank to get some change, only to be told that they don’t do that kind of thing unless the supplicant has an account with them.  “Well, I don’t have an account with you, and probably won’t ever in the future,” I replied, and went over to the Customer Service Desk.

Only to be told that they cannot open the register drawer unless “there’s a cash transaction”.

Another man may have exploded with rage at this point, but I decided to be a better man than that.  So I went back into the store itself and left my shopping cart in the clothing section, where it wouldn’t be spotted immediately — said shopping cart containing two cartons of expensive ice cream, a quart of yogurt, a frozen pizza and some fresh fruit.

Got into the car and decided to go to my old neighborhood Kroger instead, where everybody knows my name (I’ve been shopping there for well over twenty years, and the only reason I hadn’t gone there in the first place was because it’s about three miles away from the apartment AND it lies on the other side of some serious road repair works).

So I went where everybody knows my name — and where quite a few people know everybody else’s name, to judge from the odd person chatting to another in the parking lot.  Took an old lady’s cart from her just as she’d finished unloading it, getting a grateful “You’re my hero!  Thank you!” which made me feel quite better about my world.

Went into Kroger, got all the stuff I’d left in the cart at Wal-Mart plus a few other impulse items, and went over to the Customer Service Desk’s Jeanelle, who not only gave me change upon request, but got me my lottery tickets from their machine.  (She has a lovely singing voice, by the way:  one of those deep, rich gospel/soul ones, which I’d heard on a previous trip.  She is also one of the few people who has ever tripped me up on musical trivia, in that she knew the correct release date of Stevie Wonder’s album Songs In The Key Of Life.)

Checked out using the self-service aisle (I only go full service if I’ve got a large full cart, and that in the interests of speed), waved good-bye to Angela the supervisor, waved to Debbie the front-end manager on my way out, and after loading up the Tiguan, filled up at the pump using my Kroger Fuel Points (11c off per gallon when buying more than 8 gallons).

Got back home — the ?Buick? was no longer there for me to see what it actually was, so I filed that under “Unimportant Shit” and forgot about it.

Net result of the day:  considerable personal satisfaction (mission accomplished, grocerywise;  watched an asshole get a speeding ticket;  denied Wal-Mart some profit both from an unrealized transaction plus — I hope — some spoiled unsellable foods, as well as having my gas money go to their competitor).

And I got to interact with people that I don’t really know, but had only pleasant experiences with.  On a warm autumn day (no a/c needed in the car) in north Texas.

Not too bad, all things considered.