December 8, 2014
I love the little things…
Office supplies: awesome pens, planners+calendars. Sometimes it’s nice knowing what day it is.
Mailing supplies: labels.
Brown kraft paper: for wrapping parcels. Also, I love that word. Parcels.
Foods I’m Missing
(Obligatory disclaimers: Yes, these are the “not-recommendeds”; yes, I know I don’t have to religiously adhere to it; yes, I’m choosing to do so anyway. I love food but given my craptastic and unpredictable medical history, I’d rather avoid even minimal risk for LB where possible for some months. I’ll be grumpy but it’s still my choice. I have no judgment or opinions on what other pregnant choose or don’t choose to eat. And I reserve the right to have a wee whine about it.)
Brie.
All the runny eggs. Poached. Sunny side up. Soft boiled.
Raw fish.
Sprouts for my sandwiches.
Rare roast beef.
Steak. Medium rare.
Salami.
Prosciutto.
Corned beef.
Albacore tuna. Cooked. Raw.
Where’d you go?
My Toes: I know they’re there, and I guess basically everything else is still there too, but I can’t really see the rest of myself below the top hemisphere of this globe I call my belly.
Dexterity: As if there was much before but the toppling over like a felled tree is happening more and more often. Falling off curbs is nothing new.
At least once a day, trying to work: In the chaos of cleaning and purging, I can’t figure out where anything lives anymore.
Feels like…
I have been congested for six months straight.
I’m smuggling a globe/There’s a madly spinning rotisserie in my midsection/I’m hosting a swim meet.
There’s a squirrel nesting in my head, occasionally taking my brain off for a stroll.
We’ll never finish this organizational kick.
We may actually get a winter around here… Maybe?
It’s time to wrap All The Things. For Christmas, for birthdays, for anything! Send me your parcels, I will wrap them!
12 am to 2 am snacks
Half an orange.
Two string cheeses.
A basic quesadilla.
Cheesy toast.
Popcorn. (479 degrees may be a pretentious-ish brand but I loooove their sea salt caramel flavor)
A fried egg on toast.
Things I say a lot now…
What is going ON?
I’m going to squish the dog now. I can’t squish the dog now. I shouldn’t have squished the dog, I’m stuck.
Seamus, stop licking!
I need a quesadilla.
Geezus, Wesley! #AngelRewatch
Aggravating person, I HATE YOU.
If I were to create a new job, what would that be?
None of these are productive lists, really.
September 8, 2014
Most of my days are “those days”. Days where I’m happy if I’ve managed to work a full day and get things done, fed myself real food, taken care of the dogs, and possibly even created less mess than I cleaned up.
Most of them are “Igh, feels like crap” days.
But on occasion there are those stellar days when I didn’t just work, I didn’t just eat, I’ve also: cleared the monthly finances, done the housework, made an actual meal, and done some financial research. Even played with the dogs, not just skated by with a walk and some petting.
They’re rare and I love them all the more when they come around. Never mind that there’s a big ole letdown in the aftermath when I can’t do that much in one go again, the actual day is pretty fantastic.
Anyway, I haven’t decided yet which day this is, but PiC’s caved in our ongoing (wimpy) battle over whether to handwash or use the dishwasher because the time and energy we save not handwashing can really be better used on the 30,000 other things that need doing but for which we don’t yet have some sort of automated, robotic way to do them. So that’s kinda nice. It does mean that I more routinely horrify horrified the dog when the dishwasher runs (just Doggle, Seamus is utterly indifferent), but today’s run has had me hopeful he’s going to he would get over it as we‘re not stopped fighting over where he should go in case of Dishwasher Lives! Emergency.
This whole thing’s got me thinking about how else we can save more of our energy.
Also it’s got me thinking about how in the old country, as recently as during my childhood, food was always fresh and we weren’t connected or didn’t rely on electricity around the clock ..
BUT:
dishes and clothes were always washed by hand, using rainwater or water brought up from the river if it’d been a dry winter or especially hot summer;
meals were planned based on what was fresh at market and cooking them always included marketing once or twice a day;
electricity was only possible when you cranked the generator and sometimes not even then so bedtime was sundown;
forget actual running water for showers or toilets;
and good grief, the mosquitoes. I don’t care who you are or how tough you are, if you’re a blood bar for mosquitoes, you would hate them too.
I loved my time growing up in the rural farmstead but never will I ever romanticize that pioneering type life!
Right, so back to the point… !
I’m still mulling over whether it’s worth hiring help to lightly clean the house; we don’t typically care about super cleanliness unless people are coming over to stay.
Perhaps the solution to my inability to keep up with the shedding (by rugs and by dogs) is really just the robot vacuum? Or is cleaning that thing more trouble than it’s worth?
I’m actually back on the fence about the dishwasher – I need a better tutorial on how to load it or something.
We’ve experimented with ordering in a little bit more during the hectic times using coupons and deals. It’s absolutely a load off my brain and energy to not think about what to cook on delivery days but I’m not in love with the offerings all the time and without a deal it’s not quite cost effective enough to win me over. Still, we’re playing with the idea of scheduling delivery twice a month and economizing by buying and cooking more fresh produce regularly.
Is it weird that the only outsource candidates are cooking and cleaning? Everything else seems to require our input/judgement calls: looking for deals, managing the household finances (though I am now outsourcing our taxes because BRAIN), routine shopping and tidying, laundry, dog medical care. Of course I do enjoy doing laundry, and most of those other things, so probably that’s why it doesn’t make the list.
It’s not like we have vast sums of money to spend on this stuff, I’m just pondering aloud while I figure out how to maximize the money we do spend and the time we could use more wisely.
What would make your lives easier?
July 3, 2014
I’ve been seeing tweets about how whiners whining about the Hobby Lobby decision are stupid and then I saw: “you’re paid cash to go buy food, why can’t you also take that cash and pay for your own damn health insurance?”
And I’m even seeing PF bloggers apparently agree that these are equivalent. And it’s driving me a little crazy.
I don’t even know where to start with the ways this whole thing drives me crazy: financially, scientifically, medically, philosophically but I’m just throwing a few of them here so I can get back to work. I’ll grant this could be more polished but seriously, I need to get back to work.
1. Health insurance is vastly, VASTLY, more expensive than food. And plenty of people go without health insurance in order to pay for food. It’s a compromise that simply cannot go in the other direction. So given that you’re only paid X amount per month, one of the first things you’re going to pay for is FOOD. And shelter. And we all know that medical care is so expensive in this country that one or even two medical emergencies can bankrupt you. Food is not the same thing as healthcare.
2. You’re paid cash for your work, yes, but your health insurance is a part of your compensation package for work you do for them.
It is either offered as a competitive advantage over other employers or you’re paid more money because the smaller employers cannot afford to offer it as part of their benefits. And that’s if you’re working at a level or a place where benefits are even offered. But either way, they sure as shootin’ aren’t offering NON employees health insurance, so what the heck is with the the implication that you’re expecting free lunch? So I expect to be able to use my health insurance just like I use my cash: how-the-frak-ever way I choose.
As Greg Rucka said: Health insurance is not “free abortions” or “free contraception” or “government anything.” It is compensation. For work.
By the way, plenty of top companies ALSO tout their actual free lunch (and even dinners) as a benefit of working for them. But you have to ACTUALLY WORK FOR THEM. I should have thought that was obvious.
3. The audacity of any employer, or any layperson who is NOT my health care provider/professional, telling me what I can or cannot use in treating my medical condition because they decided it violates their personal beliefs is beyond the pale. Heck I don’t think the health care provider/professional’s personal beliefs should have any bearing on my medical care.
Where the hell do businesses get off redefining science and medicine for their employees? And why do so many people seem to think birth control is birth control is birth control and is ONLY used for birth control? Here’s a secret: It’s not.
A) One medication does NOT work just the same as any other for every single person. There’s a REASON we have to have alternatives. 20 pain medications prescribed to me do nothing but make me sicker. ONE of them makes me physically better and mentally a cracked up mess. If the 22nd medication worked for me, that’s the fricking one I’m going to use! And if an employer wanted to tell me that, well, they believe that 22nd medication is from the devil and so I should only use the 21st, I’d toast Satan while quaffing my meds and flip them off with the other hand.
That doesn’t even touch on my next point …
B) Cost. COST! I’m SOL on the point of controlling pain, I live in constant pain every day, but if there was an alternative that cost $1K a month and my employer-offered health insurance refused to cover it only because they philosophically disapproved so I should use the other cheaper and religious-belief approved options? Y’all would see Mount Vesuvius all over again.
C) Do you know what else birth control is used for? Just a few reasons it’s been prescribed to just the people I know:
To mitigate the crippling (literally crippling) effects of menstrual cycles. I’ve had more than one friend who had to be on birth control because they had passed out from the pain and the excessive blood loss.
To mitigate the crippling effects of, or even to treat, endometriosis.
To mitigate the side effects of the menstrual cycles in relation to other conditions. I had to stay on it for 3 years because that to allow me to remain mobile and productive because otherwise I’d lose weeks out of the month as it aggravated my fibro.
The day that Magic Elixer Snake Oil Ltd comes out with something that treats all of those conditions, problems, and all the other ones that birth control helps with? We’ll talk. Until then, non medical and science professionals need to take a BIG step back in declaring what exactly medications do or are.
4. This judgement offends my conservative nature to no end. I believe in small government and that the government should stay out of my bedroom, my shed, and get the hell off my lawn. I also believe in the health of the herd and I believe in health care; you want to prevent a huge financial burden on the nation due to aging and chronic preventable illnesses? You want to poor people to stop having so many babies that will need assistance? *points to healthcare* Hi, there’s a really good answer for that. I believe in personal responsibility and I believe there are times that common sense, not politics, is the answer.
And there’s not one ounce of my being that would think that my employer should have the right to hang out in my doctor’s waiting room dictating what science and medicine is or does or is acceptable according to their beliefs.
More specifically, saying that prevention of pregnancy is the same thing as aborting pregnancy doesn’t make it so and saying that any religious beliefs of ANY sort should dictate how I or any of my family or friends or fellow citizens can receive treatment based on the fact that they’re employed by someone holding those beliefs is beyond preposterous. I respect your religion, so you damn well better respect mine.
In short, this decision is poor on so many levels and sets a precedent that doesn’t bear thinking on but now we have to because the “narrow” ruling’s already being broadened from “only four” birth control methods to “for-profit employers who object to all twenty forms of birth control included in the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, not just the four methods at issue in the two cases decided on Monday.”
Lastly, I was very interested to see religious leaders speaking out against this:
Although the owners of these for-profit corporations oppose the contraceptive requirement because of their pro-life religious beliefs, the requirement they oppose will dramatically reduce abortions. Imagine a million fewer unintended pregnancies. Imagine healthier babies, moms and families. Imagine up to 800,000 fewer abortions. No matter your faith or political beliefs, our hunch is that we can all agree that fewer unplanned pregnancies and fewer abortions would be a blessing.
Julia K. Stronks, evangelical Christian and political science professor together with Jeffrey F. Peipert, a Jewish family-planning physician
The New Testament never—not one time—applies the ‘Christian’ label to a business or even a government,” he writes. “The tag is applied only to individuals. If the Bible is your ultimate guide, the only organization one might rightly term ‘Christian’ is a church. And this is only because a church in the New Testament is not a building or a business, but a collection of Christian individuals who have repented, believed on Christ, and are pursuing a life of holiness.
Jonathan Merritt, an evangelical Christian writer and blogger for the Religion News Service
September 25, 2012
As usual, there’s a slew of things to take care of when leaving a job. I’m reviewing the list and slowly checking things off:
1. Health care: Already transferred medical, dental and vision to PiC, so I don’t need COBRA.
2. FSA: I kept this with my own firm.
A) I’ll need to make sure that I can be added to PiC’s account as a spouse. Pretty sure it’s not under the dependent clause. The language doesn’t sound like it but there does appear to be a provision for the spouse and family to use the employee’s actual FSA account.
B) I’ve got 90 days to complete any claims against my own account. Frustratingly, even though I still have access to the account administration system, there’s no way to tell them to stop emailing my old work email address if they need to contact me through that system.
3. 401(k): Time for another rollover IRA. All of my accounts are with Vanguard, and my last rollover IRA had enough in it to be converted to Admiral Shares (woo!) so I’d like this to go right into the Admiral Shares.
However! I have a baby Rollover IRA still sitting in a STAR fund because it was only a little over $3000 so it’ll never qualify for an Admiral bump of anything.
As much as I hated the fees from this small company, we had a decent match so I contributed enough to get the full match. After 2 plus years, I have about $16,500.00 in this account. That would be more than enough to add to and convert the STAR fund into a respectable Admiral something.
4. Final Check: Last days worked and vacation are paid out. It’s standard that sick time, if separate from vacation, doesn’t get paid out. Action: Deposited that sucker, soonest.
Unlike my last job where I spent years not taking any vacation, and therefore ended up with about a month to cash out, I only had several days of vacation saved. It’s a nice extra bit of cash, I don’t need an unbudgeted cash infusion just because, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy the vacation time I did spend!
Is that everything?
January 31, 2012
There’s a blogger who frequents another very popular PF blogger’s site and comments in a way that reminds me of another person who used to squat on generally popular blogs: All Financial Matters, Single Ma’s blog, I can’t remember where else, but definitely at least those two, named Minimum Wage. Does anyone remember MW? I can’t recall if MW was male or female but MW was a down and outer, and ze was determined to crap on everyone and everywhere. It did not matter what the conversation was, ze had something negative to say:
“I wish I had that kind of money.”
“I wish someone would give me that kind of job/salary/bonus/promotion/praise. I’ve been working for minimum wage for the past XYZ years…..”
“I wish I could have that kind of vacation. I haven’t had a day off since …..”
“I wish I could have that kind of car. I can’t even drive a working car because ….”
“I wish that was my life. Must be nice.“
“I wish I could have retirement savings – boy I wish I could even think about retiring someday, I will never get to retire because all I make is less than [wait for it] minimum wage and I will never get out of this rut and life.”
Sunny, hm? And the second anyone made the slightest move toward asking after what MW did or made in the hopes of offering any sort of suggestions that MW might use to lessen the plight, WELL. You might well have spit in MW’s face.
Eventually MW faded off the scene in some way, but today I discovered that one of our fellow PF bloggers has a rather pestilent commenter who is persistent in crapping all over his blog and while I’d noted the name once or twice before, I didn’t realize ze had a blog of zir own. Curious whether there was something more behind this person, I tarried for a moment and found that actually, this person was only a couple years younger than me and my.. my oh my oh my oh my. This was rather a prime example of the sort of personality that the older generations tut tut at and say: we’re screwed. As a dear friend said: FAIL.
So very much of the blogger’s posts were just for lack of a less kind word: whining. The blog seethed with entitlement.
For example: A very small debt had blossomed some multiples beyond the original principal because ze hadn’t paid and eventually ended up going to court and settled against zir. Ze has decided that there’s no gain to be had in paying it. So ze refuses.
Ze also refuses to work a full work week because ze “hates zir job”. Ze won’t find a better job (“can’t”), so instead presumably mopes about but defines the remaining time in the week as time for doing stuff like chores or exercise or blogging. Anything but working or going to school. Those latter two are definitely not on the list. And so ze declares zir job and loathesome bloggers who are successful in life and making any better salaries in any way, those despicable people who have found a way and means, anathema. They and the people who patronize zir job are brats. Ze cannot be one, of course, because ze has no means, the lack thereof clearly demonstrated by the poorness of which ze is plagued.
At this point, I lost my mind a little. I very nearly left a comment. Really? Ze is not a brat? REALLY?? Ze works hours that wouldn’t qualify as half a job’s time, can’t be bothered to plaster a fake smile on zir face, and openly scorns doing that much and the rest of the world that shuts up and puts up?? And has the nerve to hide behind the lesbian card? The people of color card? The woman card?
Throw ’em on the table. Throw them all on the table. Anything else you got? Oh, “lives with your parent” was the concession. Well that’s neither here nor there in the game of brattiness.
Well, here’s a little PSA. Brats come in all genders, drive all kinds of vehicles, are present in every economic band. It’s all in the attitude toward others and willingness to put everyone else down as “Other” and say that they’re just not going to put up with any kind of anything from anyone because they will be treated precisely one kind of way from only THIS sort of people.
Brats certainly are the people that you don’t like here but they are, alas, not so far away as all that from the picture you have painted of yourself. And being abusive is only half a step away from inviting and creating an abusive environment.
It’s a shame that you heap such vitriol on bootstrappers when that’s actually the way that most poor people find their way out of poverty. It may be hard to see from their positions now just because they “have so much” and maybe some of their advice rings hollow just because they have anything more than you.
I’m not going to give any advice. I’m just going to say it’s shortsighted, intentionally or not, that you’re dismissing and in fact attacking a group of people who by definition were once much like you.
I worked myself out of relative poverty working 80 and 100 hour weeks for umpteen years, and my parents took more than 20 years before me because they were strangers in a foreign land to start over. That was on top of the 15 years they’d already spent working out a living in their native land. But without fail, 365 days a year, year after year, they put a smile on their faces and went to do whatever jobs they had at the time whether it was picking up after someone else’s animals or children or land or mopping the floors or building a fence or laboring in the sun or rain.
Did they like it? Of course not. Did they want to do it? Of course not. They did it anyway.
Did I like my ridiculous hours? Heck no. Did I want to work 14 hour days? Of course not. But to make sure that the bills were paid and we didn’t carry debt forever, I did it.
And were my clients and shoppers nice to me? [Hysterical Laughter] How many diatribes did I listen to? How many insane people did I encounter? I can’t even begin to remember anymore. (I do remember having the same flipping conversation with the same old man every two weeks for five years straight because he could not remember a thing. We smiled every two weeks.) Does it matter now? No. Because it doesn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that I always did a good job, kept my eye on the important things, got through the days good or bad, and took care of my family so that my physically sick and mentally ill mother did not have to keep working with and listening to the abuse of the bullying crappy coworkers who always had poor attitudes and felt like they were always having a bad day and could take it out on the poor weakest one in the shop.
Not everything goes your way. In fact, very very little ever does without an immense amount of effort. But there is a bigger picture. Whether you can or will or want or don’t see it – that’s your call. I’m a bootstrapper whose family was poorer than dirt and we fought long and hard each and every d*mn day to win against the grind and still fight it every day because life is just not that easy.
The real lesson here isn’t who can make it in life because they worked harder or who can shout “lazy” louder or who has more money. It’s about who has the gumption to try and find the way to be happy because I’ll be darned if there’s a one of us PF bloggers trying as hard as this one to beat Minimum Wage at zir game of Misery.
March 19, 2011
It’s not going to be because of the night owl tendencies that Monday morning is going to dawn a bit more darkly than Saturday or Sunday.
Dare I cop to burnout so soon? Dare I admit that it’s been a long hard slog since landing this gig and no matter how hard I work, there’s always more piling on, more left to do, more that staff need from more, more expected of me, more, more and more?
Yes, we’ve got a vacation coming up but more often than not, the thought on my mind has been: what would I rather be doing?
And I know this has been an excellent learning experience, albeit a painful one, so it’s hard for me to say I want to do anything but this – that may just be the Tired As All Get Out speaking.
So instead, as I don’t rightly have the answer to that for myself, what would you rather be doing? Monday morning when you arise from your beauty rest, what would you ideally be getting ready to do for your daily bread?
March 9, 2011
On FB’s post, Can you survive on an extreme budget and make tough choices?, I ran across Insomniac Lab Rat’s comment that rang old bells for me:
“I didn’t find the game to be THAT realistic, because I felt that most of the times I played I had horrible “luck”, and most people won’t experience that many bad things in such a short time span.”
My response was turning into a saga so I took it back home. I understand it seems unrealistic but it is real – I’ll explain below. It is a bit of a personal bugbear, but I really like to point out the difference between luck and life happening and how they look remarkably alike.
This is what happens: When you’re in such a low or tight a situation that you have no cash flow, every single demand on your money is a choice that leaves another demand unanswered. You have all the same basic needs: food, shelter, medical, education, insurance, social obligations as others, but severely limited resources. Your daily question becomes: how do you cover six square feet of area with only three square feet of material? Everything that comes of luck, plus everything that naturally would have happened anyway and over time becomes defined as “bad luck.” That redefines your landscape.
As a player of the game Spent, what you are exposed to is that greater frequency of what appears to be bad luck but it’s really not. You are experiencing all the demands of real life in the way that someone who has zero outside resources would experience: the illness that is inconvenient for most but disastrous for someone without sick leave and can’t afford to lose the pay, the commitment that takes away the cash you needed for that other bill, a $25 late fee because you didn’t have last month’s bill money, the extra rise in Bill C that makes Bill D impossible to meet this month. They’re annoying to the average person with an extra $100 cushion in pay per month. Impossible if you just don’t have cash or credit.
Probably the less realistic bits of the game are that it doesn’t provide any of the truly creative resources you might be able to draw upon if you could figure them in real life. And that’s about right for a majority-case sort of game.
When you have an adequate cash flow, when you have any cash flow, you can absorb some smaller needs, and then only the significantly unexpected, or the “bad luck” stands out. When you have no cash flow, every single thing is bad luck. That’s why, a few years ago, I wrote about why I didn’t attribute our family situation to luck any longer – it was choices, it was circumstances, it was short and long term developments that happens to everyone that comes up.
When we were living that way, scraping penny to penny, life really did seem to kick us, up or down, like that and I watched my mom start calling everything bad luck. In 2008, I first noticed the trend to blaming the circumstances of our lives on luck. A year later, I realized the toll that making choice after debilitating choice took on her, and our relationship. It feels like being stuck in a channeling trap to ultimate failure.
After having been a real life player in a game of Spent, I know that you take those hits, over and over and over. You make those choices and hope, you make those choices and pray that you get from point A to point B, from point B to point C and you try to find ways to do things different every time to make it better but there are constantly setbacks, every week and every month. Right here on this blog, you’ll see my commenters note that it’s like a two-step, one step forward, two steps back.
It really wasn’t luck, though.
Though there was a time it certainly felt that way after I’d finally just sold our third vehicle at a loss, and then my dad totaled the sedan. My commenters made me laugh, though. “Death, Dismemberment, Disembowelment, Dysentery” indeed.
Yes, there are times I shake my fist at luck. But Luck happens, good and bad. Just be prepared for it, no matter what it is.