Bees!

Warning: there will be photos and video of bees on this post, so if bees creep you out, don’t proceed any further!

As I mentioned last week, I now have a hive in my backyard. It’s not my hive, I’m just the “landlord,” and that suits me just fine. I already have so much to take care of in my life between the house, garden, dog, chickens, job, and self, that I didn’t feel like I could take on any more responsibilities at this time. But I don’t have to take care of this hive since my dog walker, Paul, is the beekeeper. I just get to enjoy the bees.

The bees were installed in late April, and I took video of the process. Follow the link* to watch how Paul literally shakes the bees into the hive!

Paul adding bees to the hive

I was standing about five feet from the hive while this was happening, wearing nothing more than a light jacket and jeans. There’s a brief point where I blow a bee off my finger, making the shot go a little haywire, but otherwise I had no other bees make contact with me.

The hive had been put in place just the day before. There are two boxes of frames, a few of which had some comb already built out on them. The bees use comb for nurturing brood (bee eggs or pupae), storing pollen, and storing honey.

About a month later, here’s those busy bees at work.

Frame full of bees

Contrast that nearly full frame of comb with one that is still “under construction.”

Partially full frame

Notice how calm the bees are. Whenever Paul has to work with the bees he uses a bee smoker to shoot a few puffs of smoke at the hive as he works. He’ll start the smoker, puff around the hive a bit, take the lid off, puff some more smoke into the hive, and add a bit more smoke here and there as he works his way through the boxes of frames.

Meanwhile, I’m usually right there with my camera taking photos and helping him work. I don’t feel the need for any protective gear, and have even  helped him with the hive while wearing cropped pants and flip flops. Paul owns a beekeepers veil, but he’s never worn it while working on the hive, either.

The bees are incredibly gentle. We had to pick up the entire hive at one point so we could position it inside a “moat” to keep ants from entering inside. My face was only about a foot from the entrance to the hive as we lifted it up and moved it around, yet I never felt in any danger.

We’ve already had a setback or two. A new hive is vulnerable to all sorts of opportunistic critters. Wasps may try to enter the hive to prey on the bees, and ants can enter the hive to steal food. While the hive was getting established they were fed with a sugar and water mixture. The ants were really attracted to it, which is why we set the hive inside a kiddie pool “moat” which would have required the ants to cross open water to get to the hive. It worked.

The other issue we ran into was that the queen disappeared. Paul thinks that it was because he didn’t have enough frames with comb on them available for her to lay brood. He could tell that the queen was missing because he was seeing less and less brood on the frames. So a new queen was ordered and shipped via UPS all the way from California. Here she is in her excluder, a special little cage she had to stay in for a day to make sure the hive acclimated to her.

Queen in her excluder box

The cage is fitted between frames in the center of the hive. Apparently it’s a good sign that the worker bees crawling on the cage are facing her and trying to feed her. If they were aggressive towards her, they would have been facing the other way and trying to sting her.

When the hive is open, I love watching the bees at work. I’ve watched them doing their little bee dance, and I’ve seen them raising their rumps in the air, fanning their wings to spread messages with pheromones. Watching the bees as they zip to and from their hive is also a treat.

Probably one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen when observing the hive was the work of undertaker bees. Paul had told me about them, but I didn’t think I’d see them at work. Undertaker bees are in charge of cleaning up dead and dying bees from the hive.

A few days ago I was in the garden and stopped to watch the bees. That’s when I noticed this entourage leave the hive flying in a poorly coordinated fashion. There were two worker bees carrying a third bee between them. They only made it about six feet from the hive before they fell to the ground. The worker bees seemed to be trying to get going again, but they were only rolling around on the ground and eventually first one, then the other worker bee took off and flew back to the hive. I noticed that the bee they had dropped was still moving its legs, so I picked up a stick and turned it around so I could observe it better. It’s wings looked in poor shape and it’s abdomen looked oddly deflated and not plump.

Apparently worker bees only live for a little over a month. They work so hard that they may actually wear out their wings. That dying bee may have been a worker or it may have been a drone that had recently mated with the queen, which would have accounted for the abdomen looking so odd. Apparently when drones mate with the queen, their endophalluses are ripped off and their abdomens are ruptured. Yikes! What a way to go!

*Apparently I can’t embed the video without purchasing more storage from WordPress. It’s a short but interesting little video, so I encourage you to follow the link to my Flickr account and watch it.

Happy birthday to me!

Today is my birthday. I’m now officially 46 years old and closer to 50 than I am to 40.

It’s OK. Getting older has some benefits. To me it seems that aging involves better self-knowledge and general life experience, but less physical resilience. I haven’t fallen into total decrepitude, although I did spend most of one day in the ER last month only to learn that I can now add diverticulitis to my list of infirmities.

I’m stumped as to why I developed a condition and infection that typically develops from eating too much processed food and low fiber. If you ask any of my family and friends, they’d say I eat a heck of a lot of veggies and high fiber foods, and eschew most highly processed stuff. It may be that the dietary changes I’ve been forced to make with the braces have had an impact and/or it may be stress related.

Stress is something I really need to get a handle on. For the past several years I’ve become increasingly unhappy in my job, and I’ve tried to find something to do in my company that will continue to interest and stimulate me. I’ve been working with this organization for nearly 15 years and there is a lot that I like about it. But if every day is a drag and leads me to spikes of frustration and tears, then it’s time to do make some changes. I’ve been transitioning to a new role for the past five months, yet my tolerance levels haven’t improved. I still get pinged about stuff related to my old role and haven’t completely off-loaded certain tasks. When that stuff happens, I can feel really explosive.

There are frequently days where I feel like just running away and living in a little camper truck so I can pick up and move whenever something starts to annoy me.

We’ve been having the most marvelous spring weather, though, and it makes me love my garden and yard intensely, and reluctant to give it up. We had a lot of rain in May, and even some flooding in the area. (My house remained dry and snug.) There have been a few light showers in June, but nothing terrible. The coolness of the weather has been a real delight. Some people love hot weather, but I’m more fond of the moderate temperatures we’ve been having.

I’ve added two new things to my life this year that are working out well so far: bees and horses.

The bees are living in the garden in a hive owned and cared for by my dog walker. He started exploring bee-keeping last fall, and approached me a few months ago about putting a hive in my yard. I love bees and have often thought about adding a hive to my yard, but the learning curve was intimidating to me. I now have the best of both worlds: a hive AND no responsibility to care for it.

I’m fascinated by the bees, though, and whenever Paul has to tend them I’m usually right there with him watching and learning. They are super gentle. We’ve had to open the hive a few times, and even pick it up to place it on a better footing, yet the bees have never acted aggressively or stung us once. While Paul does have a bee veil and suit, he’s never needed to wear the veil while working with the bees, and I’ve been out there helping him wearing shorts and flip-flops.

I haven’t added a horse to my little city homestead, but I have been happily (ecstatically!) taking riding lessons at a stable not far from my home. Like many girls, I was horse crazy in my younger years. We didn’t have the resources for me to take riding lessons regularly, but I did spend two weeks at Girl Scout “horse camp” one year, and learned how much I preferred English tack over the Western gear I had been exposed to during occasional trail rides. Back in 2008/2009 when I was going through the divorce, I identified regular horseback riding as something I wanted to take up during one of my introspective times. I made some attempt at that time to take riding lessons at a local stable (not the same one I’m riding at now) and was really disappointed.

This time the opportunity presented itself because one of my friends suggested we take a vacation to Scotland in the fall. In looking over the details of the trip, I saw that a couple of the places we’ll be staying have riding stables nearby. So I got the idea to train for taking one or two (or maybe even three) half-day riding excursions while in Scotland. While it may be possible to ride Western saddle there, I really want to ride English and am training with this in mind.

The stable I’m going to now is so much better than the other one I tried. I like all the people I’ve met (trainers, receptionists, grooms, and other riders), and all the school horses I’ve ridden have been well-behaved. I’ve been on five different horses and am working with two different trainers so I’m getting a lot of varied experience, which is exactly what I want and need.

I started lessons in March and am now riding twice a week. Even though I was in pretty decent shape before I started lessons, it’s taken a while for my body to adjust to the demands of riding. I have to develop muscle memory, balance, and confidence to be a good rider. I’m not the fastest kinesthetic learner, and while I could build strength in the muscles used in riding at the gym (core and legs), there isn’t a way to emulate exactly how those muscles are used in riding except to…well…ride.

Just in the past two weeks my posting trot has improved tremendously and I’ve had good experiences on four different horses with four different strides. I also was approved to participate in an open ride (supervised, but not being trained) last week when there was a scheduling snafu and I found myself without a trainer. Not only did I get the riding time, I was able to spend it productively working on my posting trot and balance. (And I’m proud that I was able to get that particular horse into a trot all by myself, since this can be a challenge at times!)

I’ll be working on trotting for a while yet, but I’m also eager to add in cantering and some small jumps. Frankly, I’m super happy to just be on and around horses. My time at the stables has done a lot to boost my happiness quotient, and I love sitting in my riding clothes, smelling the horse scent on me after I’m done. Yep, that horse craziness stil hasn’t worked it’s way out of my system after all these years.

Mother’s Day

It would be wrong to say I hate Mother’s Day, but it’s a day that I struggle with nearly every year. My relationship with my mom has never been close, and I feel resentful that I am forced to confront this every year and try to meet some societal standard for showing mom how grateful I am that she gave birth to me and raised me.

I didn’t plan to write about Mother’s Day or my mom, but after I got up this morning and followed my usual routine of catching up on my online life while having coffee, I ran across Donna Freedman’s blog post about her relationship with her mom and her regrets. I’m not feeling regret like Donna and my mom is still around, but it is a deeply moving piece to read because it is not the usual hearts and flowers stuff that is written about Mother’s Day. It is real and raw and evocative of how complex family relationships usually are.

I’m not as good at writing as Donna, but I really just wanted to get this out today. Before reading Donna’s post, I called my mom to wish her happy Mother’s Day. Even though I live less than a two-hour drive from here, that was all I could manage this year.

My current difficulties facing mom started a couple of months ago when she called me and left a vague voicemail message saying she was out-of-town, but would I please call her back. When I finally got her on the line, she told me she had fallen the day before while with her husband and stepdaughter visiting some family, and that her leg and foot were swollen, bruised, and that it hurt to walk. I asked her if she had gone to a doctor. No, she said, her husband had refused to take her. She then said was alone in the hotel room at that time, which is the only reason she felt she could call because she didn’t want to upset my stepfather telling me this.

Now, I was 22 and living independently when my mother re-married, so I did not spend any time being supported by my stepfather. I have gotten to know him pretty well over the past 20+ years, though, and he is not a monster. I called mom’s bluff and told her that if she told her husband that she really wanted to see a doctor, he would take her. Or, if she didn’t feel like bothering him with her problem, she could call a cab to take her to urgent care or an ambulance to take her to the ER. I can’t know exactly how the conversation went after she fell, but she did say that there was some talk of calling an ambulance and/or take her to the hospital, but at the time she didn’t feel it was necessary.

Yet, here I was on the phone with her talking about this because she had called me to tell me about her pain. Right. I’m over 700 miles away from her location at the time of her phone call, and personally unable to do anything to help her, yet she calls me to tell me how much she hurts and how she can’t walk and must simply lay in the hotel room all by herself while her husband is swimming with his daughter and grandchildren.

The thing is, this type of behavior is normal for my mom. She creates situations of high drama where she will get the maximum amount of attention. This goes beyond the standard claims of people who say their mother is a martyr, making great sacrifices for the family and making sure everyone knows that.

Growing up, I learned to distance myself as much as possible from my mom — both physically and emotionally — because scary things happened when she got into high drama mode. I was spared the full brunt of her antics for many years because of my ability to hide in plain sight, and because my older sister got the most of her craziness. But by the time I reached high school age, my older sister wasn’t around as much and I was starting to get pulled into her antics.

There was the time I was miserable and sulky about something, and my mother — who was driving me to or from somewhere — said she’d had enough of life, too, and she would just drive us off the highway and into the quarry we were currently crossing over. This was her way of making me shut up about whatever was bothering me and causing me to be difficult. There was no doubt in my mind that she would do it, either, because I knew she was mentally unstable. I had to beg and cry and practically lunge for the steering wheel myself to make her stop feinting towards the edge of the road.

Then there was the time she offered me a handful of pills to take my own life, as she swallowed a bunch herself. I was alone with her in the house because my father and sister were out-of-state at a family party. I had been sent home in disgrace with my mother for doing something stupid, and was grounded and confined to the house. I didn’t think it could get any worse for me, being confined to the house with just my mom for company, but mom showed me that it certainly could get worse. I called 911 after mom swallowed the pills and told them that we needed an ambulance, but my mother calmly phoned them back and said she was sorry she had caught her daughter making a prank call. I ran out of the house to the neighbor’s next door, told them what had happened, and begged to use their phone. I’ll never forget the neighbor lady saying to her husband, “Oh, not again.”

As it ended up, my mother refused to get into the ambulance that showed up. She insisted that she’d rather have her daughter take her to urgent care where our insurance would cover her treatment and made the ambulance leave. Never mind that my father and sister had the family car and the only car available was a used Buick my dad had recently purchased for use when I finally got my driver’s license. Which is how I — a frightened, unlicensed, 15-year old driver of an unlicensed car — ended up taking my mother to get treated for over-dosing on prescription meds. We actually never made it to the urgent care clinic. Along the way, she grumbled about how upset my father would be to receive the ambulance bill, and then insisted I pull over in an out of the way place where she would make herself vomit. She said she knew they would stick a tube down her throat to pump her stomach and she didn’t want to go through that again.

Again. That word came up a lot when I was growing up. Oh, mom was in a mood again.

Once I got a driver’s license, I used it to be away from home as much as possible. There was high school and a job and doing things with friends. My sister finished high school and moved out to college. A year later my father left and filed for divorce. I was alone in the house with my mom. Again. (I was also very angry with my father for leaving me with this crazy person. And that’s exactly what I told him.)

Mom tried to manipulate me in her dramatic way one more time that stands out in my memory. She woke me up in the wee hours one night crying and carrying on that she was going to kill herself. I rolled over and told her to just go ahead and do it, but to let me go back to sleep because I had school and work the next day. Around this time mom was finally seeing a therapist, a woman who asked her to bring me in one day so to meet with her so she could talk to me about how I was dealing with the separation and imminent divorce of my parents. I told the therapist about this encounter where my mother woke me up to threaten suicide. Again. I thought the therapist would have some harsh words for me, but she didn’t. She told me it was fine that I had done that.

I know mom had a difficult childhood. She has readily talked of the emotional abuse she received at home and the physical abuse she witnessed. Of how she left home at 16, eloping with my father so she could escape all that. Despite the fact that I only knew my maternal grandfather to be a loving and caring man, I’m sure she wasn’t making up stories. I realize it is possible for people to have many sides to their personalities and to have different behaviors with different people. And that often people change over time.

I recognize that my mom did her best to raise me, and that she and my father actually did a pretty good job. Both my sister and I are strong, capable, and independent women. We have successful careers and are good members of our community. Yet my sister married alcoholics, twice. She is active in two 12-step programs, which have helped her immensely over the years. And I feel like an emotional cripple.

At some point growing up, I began to think of my mother as a vampire who wanted to suck out my emotions and my life. I want so much to feel loved, but I am wary of giving too much of myself. After suffering from panic attacks over 15 years ago, I sought therapy and have done very well. I have enough emotional strength and intelligence to take care of myself, but when there is another person to take into consideration I am shaky. I’m terribly afraid of feeling subsumed. Again. It’s easier to hold myself back.

The situation with my mom calling me from out-of-town to get my attention about her fall just sapped me. It broke me down. I didn’t get angry or start crying, but I did ask her: Why was she telling me this? What did she expect me to do? Besides telling her that she needed to communicate clearly to her husband that she wanted to see a doctor, I looked up the closest urgent care centers to her hotel and gave her the phone numbers and street addresses. Then I got off the phone with her as soon as I could.

I messaged my sister, with whom I’m finally starting to have a good relationship. And she gave me the comfort that she could. “What do you expect from mom? She’s a crazy person. You know that. Don’t let her get to you.” Indeed.

So, really the best I could muster for today was to call my mom and wish her happy Mother’s Day. And to tell her that I love her. Because I do love her. Goddess help me, but I do.

Bookish things

Some of the blogs I read have been participating in a “show us your bookcases” meme. Grumpy rumblings, Mutant Supermodel, and Wandering Scientist have given a peek at their bookcases. I’m lifting the veil and showing our bookcases, too.

My knitting reference books

These are the first of two shelves of B’s books in the living room.

The shelves above appropriately “book end” the sofa. I have my knitting reference books sitting next to me whenever I’m sitting in my usual spot in the living room. Not shown is the side table where I can sit a beverage and stray stitch markers, knitting bags full of projects, and the Ott Lite that helps me see my stitches at night. B’s shelves are next to his side of the couch.

Another bookcase full of B’s books in the living room.

B mostly has books about Chicago history, architecture, and music. He’s recently thinned his collection, so there is plenty of room on the shelves here. He has another bookcase upstairs in his music studio/office that I didn’t photograph.

These are my (printed) cookbooks.

These books are in my dining room. The stack of books about meat are on loan to me from a friend so I can research how to process the odd pig parts I got when I bought a butchered pig from a local farmer.

Messy bookcase in my office

This is the messy bookcase in my office. At one time I started placing books there that had some meaning to me and that I wanted to keep, but that degenerated into a place to stack stuff in general. There’s a box at left center, for example, that has seed packets in it, and the little ceramic bowl at bottom right is used to store extra keys. (I made that bowl on a wheel when I took a pottery throwing class a few years ago.)

I have roughly the same amount of books in boxes that are stacked in the basement. One of these days I’ll get around to figuring out what to do with them…after I’ve finally gotten my home office organized and cleaned up.

Books have been a lot on my mind lately as I’ve been making more time to read. I’ve been known as a heavy reader since I was a kid, but in the past few years I’ve filled my time with many other things instead of books. Most of my reading had been relegated to scanning a few pages in bed before falling asleep.

Just after Christmas two years ago, I switched over to using an eReader almost exclusively. After trying out B’s iPad a bit, I found that I really liked the fact that I could read in bed at night without a light on (thanks to the backlit screen) and that I could even do so without my glasses since I could adjust the size of the font.

I didn’t want to splurge on an iPad, though, so I bought a Nook Color and “rooted” it so that it functioned like an Android tablet. I used that rooted Nook Color as my eReader for over a year, and then I took the plunge and bought an iPad. What I love about the iPad is that I have many choices for getting ebooks. Besides the built-in iBook app and bookstore, I have the Kindle app, the Nook app, the Google Reader, and the Overdrive Media app, which gives me lots of choices for how to consume books.

The Overdrive app can be set up to sync directly with your local public library, making it easy to borrow ebooks…if they have the books you want in e-book format and available, that is. The Chicago Public Library system has to serve nearly 3 million people — many of whom cannot afford to buy an eReader of any kind — so I don’t want to bash it for not having more ebooks available. But I do think there’s one thing that they should really improve, which is the Hold/Reserve function.

A patron is allowed to check out a maximum of six ebooks; on the other hand, a patron is only allowed to place a hold on a maximum of three. That seems backwards to me. Consider the following:

• ebooks default to being checked out for 21 days
• each patron is given five days to respond to the email that the e-book is available for check out

Therefore, each book could potentially be tied up for 26 days per patron. It’s possible an e-book is tied up for less time if the patron checks it out right away, and then returns it early. But when I find that a book I want to read is not available and I have to place a Hold, I always assume that means waiting about a month per Hold. The Overdrive interface indicates how many people have the item on Hold and how many copies the library licenses, so it gives you some idea of how long a wait there is for a book.

I also find it annoying that the Overdrive app never remembers my library login details, despite the checked “Remember my login information on this device.” My library card number isn’t easily memorized, so I’m always pulling it out whenever I want to look up the availability of a book or check the status of my Holds.

One thing about the e-book lending process that I absolutely love: there’s no possibility that I will have to pay an overdue fine. A few days before the  lending period ends, an email is sent as an alert. At the end of the lending period, the book is no longer accessible. It’s a simple process and one that does not require a forgetful and busy person like me to make a trek back to the library.

My final mortgage refinancing (hopefully)

Recently it seems there has been an uptick in posts about mortgages in the personal finance blogosphere. While Grumpy rumblings has been posting a mortgage update on a regular basis, and 101 Centavos recently had some fun equating the thirty-year mortgage and fish oil, there are two posts I’ve read in the past month that were stand outs:

Retire by 40′s Should you pay off your mortgage if you could;

Afford Anything’s Pay down your mortgage or invest in cash?

I’m not even close to being able to think about getting rid of my mortgage, so it’s heartening to read about how they can fit into a solid investment strategy. I did, however, recently refinance my mortgage from a 30-year fixed rate to a 15-year fixed rate. I’m planning on this being the last refinance I will ever have to do on this house.

When I moved into this house back in the summer of 2001, I was married and the mortgage was secured in both of our names. My ex-husband and I had very good money habits and stellar credit, but the mortgage rates in 2001 were not as low as they are now. We paid $100 extra on the mortgage each month, refinanced a few years later when the rates had dropped, and continued our practice of paying a bit extra to principal on a regular basis. Then we filed for divorce in 2008.

I wanted to keep the house and my ex-husband was amenable to that, so I had to secure my own mortgage. My credit history and rating was fantastic, and I had a stable and well-paying job, so qualifying for a mortgage wasn’t going to be an issue. However, I wanted to do some work in the house and the divorce settlement was going to leave me cash poor, so I needed to secure a “cash-out” refinancing. I worked with a good mortgage broker, but the rates for a 30-year cash-out refinance weren’t as low as a standard 30-year mortgage and I ended up paying 5.5% interest when I closed in February 2009.

In December 2009, I worked with the same mortgage broker to refinance to a new 30-year mortgage at 4.875%. At this point I had extra income from taking on roommates and had saved enough to create an emergency fund, so I felt it was time to start paying extra towards principal every month. Through December 2010, I used the old approach of adding an extra $100 to the monthly payment. (Actually, because I wanted to round-up my monthly payment to a whole number, my principal curtailment was the odd figure of $108.69 every month.) Then in January 2011, I decided to challenge myself more by rounding up the monthly mortgage payment even more, resulting in principal curtailment of just over $300 a month.

Why such a big jump in my repayments? My age. I don’t want to be paying a mortgage in my retirement years, and since I’m in my mid-40s now, I needed to pay the mortgage down faster. I ran through some options in a mortgage repayment calculator and settled on the $300 figure to get the mortgage paid off by the time I was 67, my Social Security retirement age. It was also a stretch goal for my budget and I wanted to see how it worked out. What I found was that it wasn’t as much of a stretch as I thought it would be, and I was able to continue comfortably paying quite a bit extra while still saving money for vacations and a car.

Mortgage rates continued to drop, and in October 2011, I decided to try refinancing yet again. I got in touch with my mortgage broker, completed all the paperwork, and paid my appraisal fee. This time I was going for a 20-year mortgage, so I could continue to meet my goal of paying off the mortgage by 67. Unfortunately while I had all the qualifications of a good lending prospect, the local real estate market was not in my favor. The appraisal on my house came back much lower than expected, and I was faced with the prospect of either paying PMI having to come up with a large chunk of cash so I could refinance without PMI.

I decided to simply sit tight on my 4.875% mortgage and continue to pay extra in principal curtailment. It would not have been a good financial decision to take on PMI, nor to liquidate most of my cash savings just to secure a rate that was not quite a full percentage point lower than my current rate.

Truthfully, I was devastated by the appraisal of my house. I know that home appraisals for purposes of refinancing don’t mean as much as a resale appraisal. It’s just a number of paper until you actually try to sell the house, after all. However for me, it did mean more. I had taken on the house as my main asset when I was divorced in early 2009, trading all of my cash on hand for it. So for me, the house was my divorce settlement in its entirety. Seeing that a bank appraiser thought that in November 2011 it was worth $85,000 less than in December 2008 meant that I had lost over $40,000 in the settlement. Even more crushing, the appraised value was $20,000 less than we had paid for the house in the summer of 2001. It was as if 10 years of diligent property improvements and extra principal payments meant less than nothing.

I waited until the fall of 2012 before contacting the mortgage broker yet again about refinancing. In the meantime, I continued to pay extra on the mortgage, although in early 2012 my strategy of rounding up to the nearest thousand was coming out to only $275 extra. (The difference was due to more being added to escrow for taxes.) The mortgage broker wasn’t responding to my emails, though, and I didn’t push it. The real estate market in Chicago has been lagging other areas of the country, and I was in no hurry to be told yet again that my house wasn’t worth as much as I had paid for it.

So when I got a call out of the blue just over a month ago from an employee of my current lender, Chase, asking if I wanted to meet to discuss a refinance I jumped at the opportunity. I set up an appointment at the local branch for the next week and brought along everything I would need to apply for a refinance, just in case. We ran some numbers for a 30-year mortgage. My goodness how low the payments looked. I told the bank rep how much I had been paying every month, including the extra principal payments. So we ran some numbers for a 15-year mortgage, and those payments looked very good, too.

I told the Chase rep about my experience in the fall of 2011 with the appraisal on my house, and how I thought my diligent principal curtailment would have helped. Even if the appraisal came back the same, I had paid enough principal down that I would be back to the magic 20% equity mark. (Worst case: I would be close enough that a couple thousand dollars from savings would bring me there.) I was offered a 3.125% rate on a 15-year mortgage, so I thought it worth the appraisal fee and on we went.

The appraisal was done a week later, and I was very happy to find that this time the house was valued at much more than 20% equity. In fact, it was appraised only $15,000 less than the appraisal done in December 2008, and I was at the 60% equity mark. I was also able to have the escrow waived. Now I can deal with the taxes on my own, so if there is an issue with the property tax bill I can deal with it more effectively. (The frustrations around my property taxes in 2011 were a missed blogging opportunity that I may still write about at some point.)

I know there could be rates lower than 3.125% out there for a 15-year mortgage, but I’m very happy with this rate. Chase also has a 1% cash back program if you have a checking account with them that is linked to the mortgage for automatic payments. With this program, 1% of the principal and interest payment is refunded after a year. The refunded amount can be applied directly to the mortgage principal or deposited in the Chase checking account. I did not have a Chase checking account at the time I applied for refinancing, but I opened one the same day I closed on my new mortgage. With interest rates on savings accounts being so low, I’m happy to get a little over $180 a year in the cash back program.

The close of my new mortgage was completed in a matter of minutes. Really. I got to the branch at 9 AM and walked away from the desk at 9:10 AM with a shiny new mortgage. My first payment is due May 1, 2013, and my last will be due when I’m 60.

It’s this last fact that gives me the most pleasure. In only four years I’ve gone from being cash poor with a mortgage I’d be paying into my 70s, to being on a sound financial footing with a mortgage payoff date several years before my effective retirement date. Way to go, Linda!

Identity theft and income taxes

I haven’t filed my 2012 income taxes yet, but I had planned to file them electronically like most people do these days. Unfortunately that option is no longer available to me because someone else has already filed a 2012 return using my social security number.

My first clue that something was very, very wrong was when I looked through my mail last Monday night and found an envelope from the U.S. Department of Treasury with a familiar look to it. I’m old enough to remember the days when filing income taxes involved mailing off my taxes and receiving a paper refund check in return. And when I opened the envelope, that’s what I found: a refund check made out to me and a stranger named Janice. (I’m not going to give Janice’s full name here as she may be just as much of a victim as me.)

A completely legit (and sizable!) income tax refund check from the U.S. government.

My first call Tuesday morning was to the accountant who is my tax preparer. He confirmed that my 2012 taxes hadn’t yet been filed and told me I would need to call the IRS directly. Calling the IRS around tax time is bound to result in a long hold time, so I was prepared for that. The phone tree I had to navigate was daunting and I accidentally hung up once, but I eventually got a real, live person on the phone. She asked me what tax year I had last filed, what my filing status had been, and whether I claimed any dependents. Then she confirmed the worst: that was definitely a refund check and someone had “used my information” to file a 2012 tax return.

The IRS agent informed me that I will have to file my taxes the old-fashioned way this year: by mail. I must include a copy of a government issued ID and IRS Form 14039, an Identity Theft Affidavit (of course the IRS has a form for that!). My return will be processed manually, and if I’m entitled to a refund it may take up to six months for it to be issued to me by check. As for the check, I was instructed to write VOID on the back of it and to mail it to the processing center in Kansas City.

I asked the agent if she could clarify for me that when she said someone had “used my information” to file a return that meant my social security number had been used. Her answer was yes, which meant that I had to take additional steps to make sure that my SSN isn’t used in even more damaging ways. I was instructed to contact one of the major credit agencies to place a free 90-day fraud alert, and that the agency I contacted would alert the others automatically.

When I got off the phone with the IRS, I recalled that an insurance product I had purchased last year entitled me to identity theft coverage, so I placed a call to that company next. I was given similar information by the agent and also a bit of reassurance. She said that usually these types of thieves don’t tend to use the SSNs to open fraudulent credit accounts. I hope she’s right.

One final step I took was to file a police report. According to the email sent to me by Equifax confirming the 90-day fraud alert, the report issued to me by Chicago Police Department should entitle me to an extended fraud alert, although I do have to mail in a copy of the police report and a form.

I wish I knew how someone got my SSN, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever find that out. While I’m very careful with my personal information and always cross-cut shred anything that could be sensitive, there are still many legitimate reasons that I’ve had to provide my SSN, such as on mortgage applications and school records. Heck, when I was an undergrad we used or SSN as our ID! I had my SSN memorized after just one term since we had to provide it to enroll in classes and whenever we talked with an enrollment counselor or the financial aid office. I have no idea how those records have been maintained over the years; perhaps they were easily compromised.

The IRS and financial institutions are aware of these scams and have been intensifying efforts to undercover this type of fraud. It’s because of the fraud screens the IRS and banks use that I received a paper check. The IRS agent I spoke with told me that the thief would have provided a bank account for an electronic refund, however something didn’t match up quite right and the bank rejected the deposit. This triggers the Treasury to issue a paper check, which then was mailed to the legitimate address used on the tax return.

Thinking about this just as a taxpayer and not as a victim, it still makes me angry. The one link above points to an article on the IRS website that notes the identity theft screens “…helped the IRS in 2012 protect $20 billion of fraudulent refunds, including those related to identity theft, compared with $14 billion in 2011.” People rant about wasting federal dollars, but if this is how much is recovered, I wonder how much is actually not recovered and wasted on fraud like this? Those thieves are stealing our money! Money that could be better spent on social programs for the poor and sick, for example.

Learning that your identity has been stolen is stressful and depressing. I think I’ve done all I can to protect myself from further harm in the short-term, and remain hopeful that this is the worst it gets. 

Chicken health update

It’s been rough for everyone in the household the past few months. I haven’t felt up to writing lately because we’ve been dealing with so much sickness and death for several months now. (No, none of chickens are dead…yet…I’m referring to the death of B’s father, which will take much time to process.)

The chickens seem to have recovered from the respiratory illness. Every once in a while I’ll hear one of the Speckled Sussex hens sneeze, but their breathing is normal and they are doing OK in the cold weather. Not that they much enjoy the cold and snow. My first flock was resistant to walking in snow, too, but they were easily lured out of their coop and run with some treats.

This flock is much more hesitant to walk in the snow and they seem to prefer staying inside. We’ve had very little snow again this winter, but two days ago there was a storm that passed through and dropped about two inches. I have an old shade that I secured around part of the coop/run to keep out blowing snow, but it didn’t seem to do much good in this past storm. I can see the coop from my kitchen window and noticed that the chickens were still inside on their roosts several hours after sunrise. That’s highly unusual, especially since they have no food or water in there. B and I went out to shovel and clear snow and I found that I had to clear some of the blown snow off the ground in the run and throw down some cracked corn before the chickens would venture out. Now that’s some impressive stubbornness on their part!

Although they are now clear of the respiratory infection, though, we have another health complication that has emerged. It appears that the chickens have Favus. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the tips of Little Roo’s comb were black. I suspected frostbite since it is not uncommon for roosters — who typically have much larger combs than hens — get a bit of frostbite in the winter. About a week later the comb was still looking the same and his wattles were also looking crusty. A few of the hens’ combs were looking a bit yellow, too.

I’m a bit slow on the uptake at times, and it didn’t occur to me until a few days ago that maybe there was something else going on here. It makes sense that they would have a fungal infection after their little bodies were subjected to two weeks of antibiotics. Any woman can attest to the fact that oral antibiotics can cause imbalances in other areas of the body (ahem) that leads one off to the pharmacy in search of miconazole.

//Mini-rant digression//Gender inequality is everywhere and very visibile in the pharmacy aisles! Miconazole — which is used to treat yeast infections in women — is so super expensive at the pharmacy that they have it locked up in a cabinet near the pharmacy desk. However, there are several topical anti-fungals to be found at nearly half of the cost a few aisles away in the foot care section. Tolnaftate and clotrimazole are both used to treat the fungal infection commonly called athlete’s foot, a condition usually associated with men. Grrrr!//rant off//

I’ve only been treating the chickens for a day with the clotrimazole cream and I’m hoping to see some improvement by the end of the week. Catching each chicken so I can rub ointment into their combs and wattles is really no fun at this time of year, but I just can’t stand to see them in this condition.

Yesterday I looked all the hens over very carefully and I can’t find any signs of mites or external parasites, which is good. I am worried about one of the New Hampshire Red hens, though. She is still molting and her new feathers are coming in very slowly. In addition, her abdomen under her vent is swollen and red. I think this is the same hen I brought to the vet just before I left on vacation last fall because I noticed she had lost a lot of feathers around her vent and her skin looked very red. She is definitely the same hen that I had to leave at the vet’s office last month for nebulizer treatments. He noticed the fluid in her abdomen and thought that would make it harder for her to get better without some special treatment. (I have a hard time telling the New Hampshire Red hens apart, but I bought some color-coded chicken “bracelets” at the feed store last month, which is helping immensely.)

Looking into the matter further, I suspect she has what is called ascites. This can a problem in broiler or meat chickens which are so fast growing that their hearts and livers simply can’t keep up. Apparently it is not unknown in laying hens, either. I’m not going to start draining fluid out this hen, so I’m thinking she will need to be put down sooner or later. She can’t be eaten so it’s no use taking her to the live poultry butcher, but with the ground being frozen now she can’t be buried, either. Since she is still getting around normally at this point, I’m not going to do anything until the ground thaws or she starts acting distressed. If necessary I could put her down and stick her in the big freezer so I can bury her later, but that is unpleasant to think about.

Quite honestly, I’m feeling like this flock is doomed and they all need to be put down. It’s totally Little Roo’s fault, too. He is sweet to watch with the ladies because he takes such good care of them, but he is obviously the source of the disease that started us down this whole roller coaster ride of health issues. (No, he didn’t cause the ascites in one hen, but all the stress of the illness isn’t helping her over-burdened heart and liver.) My last flock did not have any health issues like this and they were kept under very similar conditions.

Now that I’m getting perhaps two eggs a week from them, I’m tempted to just butcher the entire flock and turn them into soup. For now, I’ll keep treating them for the Favus and proceeding as normal. But I’m not ruling out the soup option just yet, either.