July 4, 2013
It feels like keeping atop, or even just immersed in, the news of late has been one hell of a roller coaster. Maybe it’s age that compels me to think: didn’t things used to be simpler?
They were, years ago. But it seems like all that ended after 2000… dirty and useless politics and pandering, social pressures moving away from what I think are sensible, a roller coaster economy. (I’m sure it was just more obvious, not that things were really better before 2000.)
In a fit of sanity, some 8 years ago, I told a frazzled friend: it’s no use waiting for things to become clearer. As we get older, life’s just going to be more complicated and shades of grey.
In a lot of ways, that’s held true, though I’ve made it a point to cut out complications where and when I can because I value my limited ability to function. 😉
So while not ignoring the bad, the scary, and the really hard things to swallow, I’d like to focus on some good and beauty in the world on this Fourth of July.
My friend, Christopher Daley, is fundraising for his charity run for the Boston Children’s Hospital. He’s 1/3 of the way there as of today!
A Vietnam vet, James Hensinger, took some really amazing long exposure photos 40 years ago and has finally shared them with the world.
This man spent 2 years creating this absolutely incredible video of the San Francisco Fog. I’ve had the pleasure of watching this fog roil and bubble, flow and rush over the mountains, through the city and into our lives for years. This is a most spectacular way of seeing it all over the Bay Area.
April 9, 2013
[Warning: possibly a little spoilery]
Sometimes I do it to tweak PiC, or at least he thinks so, but this time I picked up the book he chose because I’ve already finished all my library books and his looked moderately interesting.
I’m not a runner and certainly don’t ever see myself marathoning but I love a well told story, particularly one of achievement, so even though I had never heard of Jurek, the book flap sounded promising enough. I’m so glad that I did.
It gave me insight into a person who knows how to endure because he learned long ago that sometimes, that’s just what you do. This resonated. It gave me insight into a journey of growth and coping, of discovery and delight in pushing yourself. This resonated. It gave me insight into the life of a runner, then an ultra runner, and how they endure through their races. This… suggested ways I could support PiC in his bid to be an ultra runner.
Written with Steve Friedman, in Eat and Run, Scott tells the story of his life as an elite athlete and as a vegan starting from long before either of those things were relevant in his daily lexicon or the running world. He was a meat and potatoes Midwestern kid managing a difficult home life who found the world of running almost unintentionally, derisively dismissed as “the flatlander” on his entrance into his first major 100-miler, and slowly transformed himself, step by step, into the elite athlete he is today.
Honestly, I say again, I’m not a runner, never was more than a sprinter in my best days, but reading this about made me rise up and go out for a long run.
Never self-effacing, Jurek also doesn’t sound like someone wrapped up in himself. He doesn’t sound like anything but a remarkably human guy who’s managed to figure things out one step at a time, painfully sometimes, and with all the steps forward and back that comes in a normal life. It’s not all about the wins, though there were those, it’s about the experience of the runs, what he learned from it, who he was at the time of the race.
That might be what struck me the most: he was incredibly focused on the running in his life, perhaps sometimes to the detriment of his personal life, occasionally giving rise to self-doubt over whether he’d made the right choices years down the road.
He doesn’t succumb to the doubt but he acknowledges it, he acknowledges that he wasn’t necessarily 100% sure of the choices he made in his life and he acknowledges the possible mistakes. I really identified with that as I’ve wondered many times in the past year how my actions failed my mother and whether she would have been better had I this or that.
Then there was a period of time he lived in debt to run those races and of course, as I’m highly allergic to debt in my post-debt life, that made me cringe a little. Still, I understood. Given the results, I mean. I would have loved to hear more about how this part of his life came together. Because I’m nosy …
The recipes he discovered, developed or loves are seeded throughout the book, linking into his forays into healthy eating and ultimately veganism, and his narration includes notes of what worked best for him during races. Once, the idea of dispensing with the medication entirely would have sounded like a pipe dream to me, living in chronic pain, but the timing is good. I’ve given up my medications this year as a regular routine and instead only take them when I can’t endure any longer. Incorporating more healing foods into our diet sounds appealing and he shows how easy and delicious it can be.
There’s precious little ego in this book, so long as you don’t think that telling your own story is ego (I don’t), just a hell of a capacity for endurance.
He sees himself as an Everyman, and sees in everyone the potential to achieve just about anything. Whether anyone can run an ultra (looking in the mirror skeptically), his modest and welcome all-comers approach makes me want to get to know him a bit more.
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.
March 29, 2010
Writing about thrift and the essence of making the best of your life reminded me that it’s been two years and two months since my grandma died. She couldn’t be a physical presence in my childhood but she represented incredible strength and integrity that informed my developing character.
Seventy-five years ago, my beloved grandmother married into a wealthy (in name only, at that point) family with only her bridal money, wedding clothes and her wedding ring. Her father-in-law, a landowner, had gambled away the family fortune, and the clock was ticking on the call date from his last throw of the die. At the time of their wedding, he had less than three years to pay the price of the final debt or forfeit thousands of acres of unworked lands. His children despaired and gave up the land as lost.
Armed with no more than an 8th-grade education and the instinctive determination to reclaim her new family’s property, she rolled up her sleeves and set about creating wealth from the lands. She directed my grandfather in his new duties, walking out the land each day until she was fully satisfied that she knew the terrain down to the last bit of soil, and made her plans.
She contracted out one-half of the land to farmers who could only afford to rent the use of the land, third world sharecropping, with specific terms – they were responsible for their own equipment and maintenance and in return for the use of the land, pay a set percentage of their yield. Her personal cash was strictly budgeted for her own operations on the rest of the land and storage facilities. Not only did she intend to make an income from the land, she meant to keep the entire operation a secret from the debt-holder hundreds of miles away. Her family knew but expected little result. “Too much work, too little time,” they said.
She didn’t just pay people to work the land, she worked it herself every single day. Growing, processing and storing rice over the course of multiple growing seasons, she guarded against word getting out that she would have rice to sell, and sent Grandpa to keep up the ruse by asking for short extensions on the final loan due date whenever he paid an installment.
When the deadline loomed, she sold all the stored and newly harvested rice.
On the final day, my grandpa’s eldest brother sat down with the banker to whom they owed the debt for the formal title transfer. Instead, Great-Uncle unpacked a suitcase of cash. The man was stunned. After his departure, she turned around and handed the title and deed to her equally shocked father-in-law.
To his credit, he tried to make her take the title. As far as he was concerned, she had rightfully earned every penny that bought back the land, and he insisted she was the new owner. And as was typical of her, she refused, agreeing only to take an appropriate fraction of the land if the rest was parceled out evenly among all his children.
Honor, Duty, Family, Birthright.
She lived her entire life by those watchwords. She raised nine children, fostered dozens of relatives, stood firm when her family and neighbors were caught in the middle of the war, buried a son, supported a son-in-law imprisoned for 15 years after the war, buried her husband, and continued to farm well into her 80s. The woman never blinked in the face of adversity; she served it hot tea and a freshly cooked meal. And a well deserved lecture, if need be.
Fun side note: when she was 82, she ambushed the wildcat who’d been raiding her outdoor kitchen in the middle of the night. She might have been 80 pounds soaking wet, but that never stopped discipline in her house. A whack across the nose, a firm tie-up in the corner of the kitchen so he’d keep until morning, and her poor housekeeper nearly had a heart attack when she inspected the “stray dog” that Grandma had captured. So her eyesight wasn’t great anymore at that age, but is it any wonder no one ever sassed her twice?
Sometimes I wonder what she would have been like in our modern world.
_______________________
February 8, 2010
Many of us who grew up with the mantra Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle may be most familiar with it thanks to the annual Earth Day activities in school where you spent a week collecting cans or brought in stacks of paper you thought your parents were done with for recycling. (Ooops.)
SSB4C made a great point about the misconception that recycling is an adequate cure-all. It’s not free, and it’s better not to use the item in the first place if you don’t need to. But our society runs so much on the Disposable Attitude that I’d like to advocate another form of eco-friendliness: repurposing.
When and where you can: consider a different purpose for an item you’re about to discard.
Containers are the simplest to repurpose. Empty glass jars become coin collectors, storage for leftovers, a temporary home for new plants, a desk organizer for pens and pencils, “hurricane glasses” for tea lights, etc. Creative kids can turn containers in to booby traps, treasure chests, bombs of all sorts.
Does anyone remember the milk jug scoops? When you finished up a gallon of milk, an adult would cut out a portion of the side, and kids could use it for scooping sand (or water during a massively unfair water fight before it escalates to just using the hose).
Or the last of the shampoo in the bottle was diluted for you to make bubbles with. Toilet paper rolls become chew toys for the dogs, cats bat around bundles of old shoelaces with a long trailing lace.
A bag full of my t-shirts, scrubs, scrap materials became a quilt.
What about choosing not to buy things if you can repurpose another item?
I’ve used this former travel pack box of Q-tips as: a wallet sized photo holder (high school) credit card/gift card holder (college), and now a pillbox.
Use glass or plastic jars to grow some herbs on the window sill, or glasses as cookie cutters instead of buying round cookie cutters?
Opt to just microwave your cup of water for tea instead of buying a new kettle like EM?
Use old or mismatched socks as cleaning and dusting rags instead of buying disposable cleaning wipes? I do this all the time to clean my blinds because they fit right over my hand like those cleaning gloves, and I don’t have to grip or anything. Just spray and wipe.
Or use the clean mate-missing sock to make a heating sock? Fill it up with rice and heat in the microwave instead of buying a heating pad. This works wonderfully as a drape across your shoulders too, for a relaxation technique. Though I’m more willing to sacrifice beans (ugh) than edible rice, I don’t know if it heats up just as well.
There are hundreds of ways we can choose to save time, money, resources and some space in a landfill by being a little creative.
January 22, 2010
A friend and I were catching up the other day, when the subject of work came up. She works in an animal clinic, and she told me about this sad case they recently saw where a woman brought in her new puppy for an exam.
This wasn’t a typical puppy wellness exam that comes with adopting an animal from the local shelter, or just because the pup was new. The poor puppy had contracted canine parvovirus, commonly referred to as Parvo or abbreviated as CPV. Parvo’s a pretty miserable disease, and left untreated, especially in young dogs, can be fatal. It basically causes the gastroinstestinal problems (sorry to the squeamish!) of vomiting and diarrhea which leads to dehydration and of course, it doesn’t take long for that to take out a young’un. So it’s a serious matter when you bring a Parvo pup in for treatment, they have to be on fluids and medications, sometimes for weeks, until the virus clears out. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. The only guarantee is that it’s a lengthy and usually expensive process unless someone foots the bill for you.
Your choices are limited: treat at the hospital and hope for the best, treat at home and hope for the best (while bleaching everything that comes into contact with the puppy), or decide to euthanize.
Confronted with this diagnosis, the woman didn’t know what to do. This is a common response.
“I don’t have a job, my husband just lost his job, and I don’t know how I’m going to feed my (2) kids,” she wailed. This is, unfortunately, a far more common response than it should be.
I have the biggest soft spot in the world for animals and have worked to pay the vet bills since I was 17, paying hand over fist for medical treatments for my dogs on occasion, but I have never put them before my family’s wellbeing, either.
On the one hand, I wanted to shake the woman, reach right through my friend’s narrative and give her a good shake: what were you doing bringing home another mouth to feed when neither breadwinner has income and you can’t feed your own children?!??
On the other hand, the damage is done and I fully believe “You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) That part of me wants to say: you find a way. You will buckle down and you find a way. I know that unemployment, especially now, is really not a choice, but picking up the responsibility of a domesticated animal that now relies on you, literally for its life, is your choice. And once you’ve made it, you’d better find a way to fulfill your responsibilities.
A lot of people choose to go into debt using Care Credit which Miss M has written about before, a lot of people use regular credit cards, and a few of them will give the pet a fighting chance at home. On occasion, some will opt to euthanize the pet.
What would you do?
February 18, 2009
Until my Twittered revelation that you can find a used car for under $5000, it never occurred to me to consider who the Joneses were in my (extended) family.
*gulp* I think it was us.
Why else would I have forgotten that cheap, used cars are not impossible to find? 12 years ago, I was happily perusing the ads for a used car I could afford in the $2-3k range. Fast forward to now and we: still rent, are down to one car (bought new) out of 3 cars and 2 trucks, and I’m the only one who has cashflow and savings. Pretty? Oh yeah.
How did this happen?
Growing up, we were poor enough that I remember my parents driving an old used car, wearing hand-me-downs and homemade clothes, and a steady diet of growing-up-poor-in-the-old-country stories. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment until I was 12 or 13. My uncle lived with us between (my) ages 3-9, so he got the second bedroom, my Dad slept on the sofa in the living room and my brother, Mom and I cordoned off the king bed in the first room. For a while, we only had a queen mattress, but getting to sleep in the bed frame next to the mattress was a treat: we fought over that little cubby-like space. Eating out was the treat of a bowl of pho ($3 each, back then) once in a blue moon, and I didn’t know that people shopped at stores, not yard sales. I had 4 of 8 dresser drawers to call my own, and I owned 3 books. The ownership of a book was a precious thing, I would give up eating and sleeping to read back then, so if I could have a book for keeps, I was in heaven.
Then, after their business was launched and keeping them super busy: lifestyle inflation. Big money was not rolling in but they decided to move and get a new car. We moved into a rental home, we kids had our very own rooms, and the next car my parents bought was a leased sedan. Then a financed truck, maybe a year after. They felt like they needed to provide a better lifestyle for us, a more comfortable one. And maybe a more comfortable/convenient one for them as well.
I had no idea what leasing or financing was except that at the end of the lease, we would return the car. Sounded like sucky to me, but my parents said the lease made sense because they didn’t want to commit to a car long term before we were old enough to pick what we liked.
Mistakes:
1. Leasing.
2. Taking on new cars without regard for the overall cost: interest, insurance, etc.
3. Even considering what kids that age might want in a car and house. We were not old or wise enough to be included in this kind of decision-making unless we were also learning to budget. Obviously, we weren’t. They should have picked a modest home and bought it before the housing market went haywire, and invested their money in that, not in our opinions. Instead, we (sort of) practiced delayed gratification in the sense that we were willing to wait to own something really nice, but didn’t understand the part where you do without to save.
My parents owned a small grocery store, and supported my mom’s many siblings by hiring them to work at the store. They also helped pay for new cars, rent, school, time off, etc. Then they expanded to open a second, bigger store that was not in the best location, and coincided with the grocery store wars. (Which was followed by the major grocery store worker strikes. All ugly.) This was a bad business decision, followed by another bad one years later to sell the first (performing) business so they could focus on the second (underperforming) one.
Mistakes:
4. They were way too generous and didn’t set firm boundaries early on. The siblings/family assumed that because my parents were business owners, they were wealthy. In reality, they were spending just as much as they brought in thanks to employing the family. Even if it was “for a good cause,” they didn’t build wealth or stability for their own family. Doing business with family = SUCH a bad idea.
5. Overextending themselves physically and financially without taking a step back to evaluate performance. My parents have a major work ethic which meant that they needed to be at each store, every day, all day. It was awful. They worked 18 hour days, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for more than ten years, and still ended up with very little.
They worked so hard to make enough money to send my brother to private school. I know they worried about sending my brother to the local public school because one of my older cousins had fallen in with the wrong crowd there, and that led to his untimely death in his early twenties. But that wasn’t the entire high school’s fault! My three other cousins did well, and even I went to that school. (In fact, my social awkwardness in high school worked wonders at keeping me out of the wrong crowd. Hah!)
Mistake:
6. Ditto #3. Coldhearted though it may sound, investing their time and attention would have been more valuable than wasting the money on him. More specifically, wasting the money on an education he didn’t appreciate or take advantage of. The money for 4 years of private high school could have been a decent amount of home equity, or retirement savings. Or health care!
During my second year of college, we had a truck and sedan, so I shared a car with my dad for several months. Then they told me that I should get my own car because sharing was difficult. Honestly, I thought it was silly because we had worked out a decent arrangement where I carpooled with friends, alternating driving days, or arranged my schedule to match my dad’s. It was a good exercise in making the best of our resources, but they kicked me out and told me to buy a new car. And not just a new-to-me car, a brand new car because I’m “a girl and therefore not capable of dealing with used car problems.”
Mistake:
7. Reinforcing the lesson that everyone had to have their own car, and that we always had to buy new.
My mistake:
Listening. BFF’s family could have found a great deal on a used vehicle. I should have stuck to my guns but I was 19 and stupid. When I was 15, I was looking forward to buying myself a cheap beater car on which I could learn basic maintenance like changing tires, oil, wipers, and other troubleshooting. Instead, I obeyed my parents and bought new for their peace of mind.
We’ve gone through 5 new cars in the last 15 years. What a waste. Can you imagine the amount of money I could have saved instead of wasting it on a new car and insurance? At least $15k in car expenses alone. I love my car, but I wouldn’t make that mistake again. [And I don’t plan to because I’m keeping her forever. Amortize that $20K+ mistake over 20 years of use, and I’ll get over it.]
When my freeloading brother finally moved out, they let him take the television and family furniture with him. I was livid: he thought he could mooch off the family, run up the bills, and then take off with anything he wanted? Yes, they let him, but what a selfish jerk. Call me a hardass, but if he thought he was so adult, then he needed to go and make it on his own. Not take whatever he liked, only to chuck half of it when he got to his new apartment, and then finance new furniture! Yeah. I lost it. My parents’ response? Was to buy a new big screen to replace the one he’d taken. A $6000 big screen that they couldn’t afford without financing. Because they thought the point of my protests were because I wanted “my” tv that I never watched.
Mistake:
8. Oh, for heaven’s sake.
So, for a (really) rough family profile comparison: my aunt is the sole breadwinner in her family, and she kept them in an apartment that costs about $800/month, drives a used car they bought for $3000 cash 4 years ago to replace their 15 year old wagon, and pays $800 in car insurance for two people a year. (That’s 66 dollars per month for two adults!)
Her two kids were each offered full-ride, merit scholarships to private schools (avg cost: 50k/year) with at least twenty thousand in additional private scholarship money so they’re not paying a dime for school. Oh, can I brag on my smarty-pants cousins a little bit? The admittance rate is something like 16%. So they kick butt.
Housing: 9600
Car insurance: 800
Total: 10,400
We went from paying about $800/month rent in 1996 to $1360 now with an additional $300-400 in utilities. Our car payments were $400+ for the recently totaled sedan, and just under $400/month for the recently sold truck. (My car was paid off in three years, but that was an expensive mistake as well: $21K in total, with an exhorbitant $XK in insurance the first year. but let’s not talk about that…..) Our car insurance was averaging something like $3400/year!
I personally paid for my entire state college education after the first year – I had scholarships and federal aid to defray the first year’s cost. [I call that the cost of being not as smart as the young ‘uns.]
Housing: 16,320
Car insurance: 3400
Total: 19,720
That’s just using the most bare bones, easily verifiable, expenses as examples. It doesn’t include any of the credit card debt that my parents had, which I think can be attributed to using cash advances/charging expenses for the business, to buy stuff for us kids, and cover unexpected expenses. Also, I’m sure that three international trips between the years of 1991 to 2000 to visit my grandparents, each costing in the neighborhood of 10K or more, were charged on the cards. By 2005, I had taken over at least 10K of their credit card debt, but you can be certain that that was not the whole of it. [Purely sentimentally, those trips were worth it because they were my only chance to meet my grandparents. Grandpa died not long after our first visit.]
At one particularly low point, probably around 2002, I remember numbers like $5-6K being discussed as the “minimum” monthly household expenses. That is absolutely insane.
When I review at their financial history, it’s staggering. It’s taken over 5 years to 1) identify all the leaks, breaks, and mistakes; 2) reduce or eliminate unnecessary expenses, and 3) see how much money was wasted as holes are plugged up.
It didn’t appear to be a lavish lifestyle, but it was for our income. There was far too much money spent unwisely, no wonder they don’t have a penny saved for retirement and my mom’s health/mental health declined so precipitously. New cars, a house, new furniture, that was all money flowing out into consumables, and not a penny to securing the future. If I’d seen the whole picture, I might have passed out. More than once.
My family scares me. I think we were the Joneses for a good long while: lifestyle was a much more visible issue than living within our limited means.
We used to sit around together and talk about the future, and what we’d have when we were financially stable or successful. Unfortunately, it was all about the things, not the obstacles we’d face or the decisions we’d have to make with regard to school, careers, and family. It was the houses, and which of the kids the parents would live with. [If we accidentally got one thing right, it was the joke that I would get the parents because I’d have worked my book-smart ass off to make the money, get the big house, and never give my brother the address. It was funnier back then. Also, I was a lot smarter pre-13-years-old; after that, it was all downhill.]
I wish we’d talked about making smart money choices, and that all choices have consequences. I wish we’d talked about making practical life choices. I am grateful that they were liberal enough first generation parents to see that a medical profession does not happiness create. For example, they never said I had to be a doctor to be good enough which is what many of my peers were told. But I wish they’d also encouraged us to make decisions based on the bigger picture, not just “do whatever makes you happy,” and realized that each money decision they made for us was a money choice they were making for themselves. And vice versa.
