December 24, 2014
Merry Christmas Eve!
This might have been more appropriate for a Thanksgiving post, but a little reflection before Christmas isn’t a bad thing.
It hasn’t been an easy year.
Hell, this decade. We’ve had grief piled upon grief, year after year. Stress and stressors are constant, if not consistent, and things aren’t perfect by any stretch.
I still want my body back. It probably won’t ever happen but reality doesn’t stop the yearning.
My 20s, starting in my teens really, were RIDICULOUS. Seemingly only memorable for the slow dissolution of our family, while I forced my career to grow like a hothouse bloom in a desperate bid to save them, all at the expense of my health and wellbeing. There are whole chunks of years I hardly remember because all I did was work + school + work.
There was a move, there was a marriage (and a wedding), and parent loss. Travel, abroad and domestic. Two huge job changes.
Bringing home our “first born”, Doggle. Celebrating our first year with him. Having Thanksgiving with him.
Bringing home Seamus.
Then losing Doggle.
The impending Little Bean.
The family relationships continuing to be crap – it’s not as bad as it’s been but only because it’s been pretty DAMN bad before.
Figuring out how to manage money with a co-pilot. Figuring out how to blog about combined/family money.
Life revolved around money (mostly not having it). Not having it was the fire under my butt to do better. Having it was a watershed moment, and purchased a sense of stability, and security that I haven’t felt since I was too young to worry about the family. (I was around 8, coming home from the library with a stack of books as tall as I, and playing with our first dog, that I last remember not worrying about anything, much less making ends meet.)
For all those years in between, “happiness” didn’t occur to me. Who worries about that when you’re not sure how you’re going to get from one broke month to the next? Or if you’re properly braced for the next emergency?
This year, it’s sunk that we are happy. Part of that’s being low maintenance. Give me a donut and I’m happy for the day. Give PiC an hour to himself, and he’s happy for the day. Clearly, our bar is set pretty low and that’s how we want it.
But more importantly, for the first time, despite all the uncertainty surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, adding a human to the family, not knowing what the heck I’m doing next, despite all the stuff that would normally set me on the starting blocks, ready to bolt somewhere – anywhere – I think I’m also feeling contentment.
Happiness is that thing that’s thrown around all the time. It’s the thing to be pursued. It brings the highs to offset the lows. We’re even Constitutionally Entitled to pursuing it. But happiness feels to me to be an extrinsic thing, so easily influenced by the external things like jobs, weather, family, friends. And once you get it, you almost have to start over and find it again.
Meanwhile, the mellower version, contentment, doesn’t get the good PR that happiness does and it should!
Whether you celebrate Christmas secularly or religiously, or not at all, I wish you all joy, contentment and warm fuzzies
December 11, 2013
PiC was relatively unimpressed when I announced that our Christmas presents this year were going to be Costco stock.
“… I like Costco….”
Yup. So do most people I know. Fun fact: Costco apparently ed to keep offering mainland prices when they opened up their Hawaii stores. This was from a Hawaii-based friend. We’ve shopped there and while I won’t say all the prices are still on par with mainland prices, they’re pretty close. For a place that easily charges 3-5x more for basics than the mainland, that’s not bad.
I’ve been on the hunt for an addition to my tiny portfolio, so I started thinking over the businesses that I’ve tracked over the years, as well as the businesses we frequent. If we’re consistently willing to spend money at a business that has a strong foundation and cash flow, it makes sense to consider them as a stock holding after some research.
I’m looking for stocks with dividends this round and Costco (COST) fits that bill. Their fundamentals looked tolerably good, though the ratios are on the lower side compared to some other stocks that are flying high. I will admit that my working knowledge of the market is pretty rusty after spending enough years sitting on stocks and not doing a lot of research. It makes Evan’s Investment Club an attractive idea; you’d think this was like riding a bike but apparently I was never that good at riding bikes/stock picking!
I decided the number of stocks I wanted (based on how much cash I had on hand, honestly), the price I’d be willing to pay and set a GTC (good til canceled) stop order at that price.
My portfolio is currently at TradeKing (referral link gets you and me $50) which has been great for my style: simple, low-cost at $4.95 per trade, easy to navigate and good information resources. I buy and hold, reinvest dividends, and balance growth and income stocks.
::Update: I’m now the proud owner of COST. PiC remains slightly indifferent. 🙂
December 19, 2011
I’m still working on this deceptively short but ridiculously time-consuming list of things to do to save money for the household. And I’ve added several items. Lists make life seem more manageable. Until you have lists of lists, at which point the system starts to break down.
1. Benefits seemed easy but it’s spawned more paperwork for life insurance purposes. I say thee, tomorrow. I shall complete the last bits tomorrow. Or at least make the next sets of phone calls to finish the last bits tomorrow.
2. Auto and property insurance research was utterly demoralizing. ie: took hours and was still nigh-on impossible to nail down a good comparison.
3. The mortgage stuff we’re getting a start on but we’re not at the point of dealing with the actual refi.
4. I’ve been madly dashing around at work trying to get everything to the right point for the upcoming new year and battling madly but quietly for my next step.
So ….
Check! I have finally wrapped five gifts purchased earlier in the year. But we’re still down at least five gifts. Yeeks!
Check! PiC blew our gift budget on ME. It wasn’t the classic (stupid) car commercial but it was a big gift I wasn’t expecting.
_____ And has been mum on the subject of his family’s gifts so they really may be getting socks. [see, blew our budget]
_____ We’re traveling a little for the holidays and then hosting a full house for a few days so we’re double whammy on the stress of preparations.
_____ I still haven’t planned anything for our anniversary. He wanted to do something special for our 1-year engagement anniversary.
_____ And I’m working on Holiday Gifts for the Office.
Check! Mission: Find Non-denominational Seasonal Cards was accomplished, though! I triumphed in the face of great mobs and traffic. *shudder* I had forgotten the state of any mall and parking lot in the end of December, since all the shopping’s been online lately.
That’s not terrible, eh? How’s everyone else doing out there?
November 24, 2011
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who is celebrating, everyone who would be celebrating, and those who would have liked to or have opted to celebrate in their own way.
We’re having a very quiet Thanksgiving this year – no long distance travel, no incredibly ambitious menu with seven gourmet-style items in a ten hour cooking marathon, no splitting our time across multiple families. I’m incredibly grateful for that. I’m grateful that we’re just doing our own little silly dinner with whatever we want, with very little pressure except for my own expectations of really really wanting yummy turkey, stuffing and gravy.
In the grander scheme of things, I’m ever so grateful for PiC’s love and support. I’m grateful for this time and space in our lives in which, despite and because of all the challenges, we’re still able to cope and overcome. I’m glad that, despite my minor reservations, we dove into the faux-lopement last month together. It’ll be a month in four days and we have had a hell of a married life so far. And yet, it’s been somehow completely non-turbulent in terms of our relationship. We do manage this kind of chaos well enough, as weird as it is to say. None of it’s actually been easy, it’s just that we’ve done this before.
I’m hugely grateful for all of the virtual support writ live from the Twitter and blogging community during these weeks and months. It’s been a pocket haven of sanity and levity.
There’s more, but I managed to cook a full Thanksgiving meal largely by myself and it was actually pretty good and I’ve eaten enough for my belly to want an extra compartment so I’m going to carry on in another post. But that I was physically able to do that? That my hands, arms, legs, and brain held out? That it actually feels like I’m sleeping when I sleep a full night, finally? That’s pretty good too.
Signing off for the night.
December 24, 2010
We’ll be doing two weekends of family stuff in a row so I’m looking forward to clearing my head after that and having a fresh start. [Lots of stress to be read in between those lines.]
Since I inadvertently skipped my November Snapshot, next week’s year-end roundup will be enlightening and possibly frightening. Let’s hope not, though. [Submitting my receipts from the business trip would have been helpful…]
Whatever holiday you celebrate this season, I wish you the very best.
December 14, 2010
It’s probably been twenty years since I last had a Christmas tree and just the prospect of getting one this year was delicious.
Negotiations were intense, and short-lived. Within ten minutes of wandering the tree lot, and squealing over the cuteness of the under three footers, my shopping ADD kicked in and PiC was asked to please make the final call because I was bored with fussing over which tree was perfect enough.
Imperfections are character and had I not mentioned the twenty year drought? Any tree is an improvement over the no-tree of yesteryear. Low expectations, indeed. Happily, we had ended up in the discount tree section by then, points to PiC for navigating so that I’m not both the penny-pinching miser and the impatient hausfrau.
Even with the discount, we (probably mistakenly) paid extra for a disposal bag, bowl and stand, checking out at $34.
With that extra expenditure over the $20 or $25 I imagined we’d spend, I’m perfectly happy to enjoy the tree in all its natural glory, and hang gifts from its branches if it can bear up. As a topper, Cthulhu shall preside.
It hardly seems to need anything else now, does it?
November 25, 2010
Having seen PiC off to the airport, my hometown friend D and I are spending a quiet Thanksgiving weekend together in the Bay Area without our families because making our ways back to Southern California just wasn’t in the cards for either of us. His reasons are his own and not mine to share, but mine are, of course, not precisely a secret.
Since moving away, I’ve been a mess of conflict struggling to remain a dutiful daughter from hundreds of miles away; fighting to establish my place in a new job, and adjusting to a new home and shifting relationship dynamics.
For the first time in four years, PiC and I are in the same city all the time. We pick up the phone and schedule a shared commute, shared dinner plans, shared grocery shopping and budget. In most ways, it’s nearly been seamless. In others, we’ve picked up our bones of contention and sparred a few rounds. At the end of the day, it’s all worked out and I’m more grateful than ever that this was the end to my almost year-long stint of unemployment. It was horribly nerve-wracking at the time, and could have been the biggest mistake ever, but so far, it’s been a huge support.
Conversely, however, for the first time in my life, I don’t live steeped entirely and totally in the family stress. And so in a strange turn of dis-inoculation, perhaps call it weakening by means of detoxification, my spirit quails at the thought of venturing back into the fray, each and every time. Every visit has been emotionally fraught, always including fights with the sibling when we run into each other, the heartwrenching sag in my mom’s cheeks, left behind from her stroke-like episodes in 2008 and other small signs of disrepair in my former home and crumbling family foundations.
After several rounds of trying to walk it off, and playing the stiff upper lip game, it was time to admit defeat. I simply couldn’t face it again this weekend, not this holiday weekend when the expectations of family are at a near all-time high. I just didn’t have the strength to pull a shroud around my soul again, and I don’t have the ability to pretend that that is business as usual. Until I have taken steps to get my parents out of their living situation and dealt with my feelings of guilt for “abandoning” them, I need to keep my physical distance for a while longer.
While I wasn’t totally happy with the decision, I haven’t had any nightmares since deciding to stay in town for the weekend. And with a friend to keep me company, I’ll actually cook dinner to eat while reading comics all day. It’s probably the best decision for me right now, and it’s about time I learned how to make those kinds of decisions in addition to taking care of everything and everyone else.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers and a wonderful weekend to everyone else! I hope you’re enjoying peace, quiet, and comfort and remember all the blessings we have in our lives. I hope you’re able to do that every day, regardless of the season.
Thanks to all you faithful friends and readers for being there in the virtual world and in some cases, in real life as well. I’m grateful for everyone’s support, online and off, you’ve made the journey this far so much more positive and even enjoyable than it was when I was just a young pup struggling to make ends meet with my minimum wage job and a checkbook.
<3