By: Revanche

Racing the clock and links

August 8, 2013

These days, especially since the summer started, I’ve been feeling like the days just blend one right into the other.

Not for any bad reason particularly. Or any bad reason generally. I work a lot. PiC’s working a lot. We don’t “get home” from work until around 8 most nights now and we’d normally be eating a lot later than that, and eating out most nights, if I weren’t taking out time in my workday to prep dinners.

My work flexibility has been a serious lifesaver in this regard.

Also on our plates: working the mortgage refi (slammed into a brick wall there); coordinating and scheduling summer travel plans; bills; taking care of Doggle’s various needs; again, keeping ourselves fed with actual groceries. No wonder all I talk about is food and … food, these days!

Our continuing experiment in shared finances is, well, continuing. Halfway through the year, I see that we have spent nearly half the annual budget in some categories and in others, we are way over already.

Household: We both bought new phones this year, a first in a few respects for me. I’ve never paid more than $40 on a phone and I’ve certainly never bought one outright until my contract expired. This time, however, my contract was expired and everyone else on the family plan still had ten months to go. The way my phone wasn’t working, waiting wasn’t an option. Same for PiC, a couple months later.

My verdict after several months of use: I generally like the phone even if it’s too big for my hands but it, like most of my new phones, seems possessed. It’ll randomly turn off without a peep, and other times the screen is slower than molasses. The battery life used to be great but unless I am considered a power user, I think it drains batteries far too quickly. Combined with the fact that sometimes it hates every charging cable but its own so I have to carry my own charging cable everywhere.

Gifts: With two more planned gifts, and not even accounting for yet another wedding we’ve been invited to, we’re already tapped out here. We budgeted $800 which seemed like plenty for giving away of things for a year. I’ve suggested that we skip Christmas gifts for the whole family entirely – you may now call me the Grinch.

Travel: This budget was set pretty high for the year and even though we actually skipped two of the originally planned trips it looks like we’ll use a good percentage of this budget, if not all. And it was a very generous budget, IMO. We’ve spent more time on the road than ever, with more miles to go, enough so that I’m sort of looking forward to end of the year and clearing the slate. And staying home for months on end.

Honestly, I’m kind of running a mental marathon here and I’m not sure when I got so busy but for the first time in my life, I’ve found myself thinking: So much work! But, I like my job and I’m happy.

Hand to JossWhedon, I’m happy with my job right now and that’s one hell of a thing.

Traveling on the hottest weekend EVER. Awesome.

If you can’t tell, the dashboard is showing an outside temp of 110 degrees Fahreinheit. /frazzled.

Doggle was traveling with ice packs on his bed to make sure he stayed cool, even with the air conditioning blasting. Thank heavens the used car we bought really was in excellent condition.

I looked up and it’s already August. How are you guys doing out there?

To answer my own question with a few links:

Can I ever complain about heat to Funny About Money in Arizona? Nooo….

I’m semi-stalking The Asian Pear for Hawaii updates.

Donna’s scold about checking your email for giveaway wins made me smile. If I won more often, that’d be the sole reason I checked email sometimes, these days it’s mostly Twitter doing email’s job trying to tell me all kinds of things. But really, it was the employment of the neighbor children that made me smile. I loved working as a kid, whether it was babysitting or doing my parents’ finances, or whatever and getting paid for it was really some major icing on the cake. Now I love getting paid 😉

My friends in (or done with) academia may enjoy Rebecca Schuman’s thoughts on leaving it and the real definition of sour grapes. It’s a good read.

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