July 26, 2022
Where we are in life: Married ten years, two kids, a dog. Mostly still hermiting with the pandemic and not hating the much reduced social life aspect of things even if I hate almost everything else about the pandemic, though we have in person school and camp and may have childcare this year.
I don’t think I’d have predicted any of this back in 2006. Maybe marriage, definitely dogs. Actually, I think PiC was in the picture by then so I think my line of thought was we’d probably get married but I was open to the idea that we might go a different way.
I think about the number of people who made it to the 9-12 year range and divorced recently. I’m glad they could divorce because they were so unhappy in their marriages. People deserve to be respected and loved in their relationships. I am also grateful that we still very much love and respect each other even when we experience friction. When we have conflict, it’s uncomfortable for a while. Usually, we figure it out in some kind of way and move along. Some dear friends are peeking at 20 years just over their horizon and I’m so happy for them too.
I like that we can tease each other mercilessly, but very fondly, about our flaws. It’s good natured, not mean spirited.
We’re deeply imperfect people, and we recognize that, which makes it possible for us to critique the decisions we’ve made, respectively, and talk over what we would do instead in the future so we’re more constructive. Particularly with parenting. We struggle with our flawed parenting but it’s helpful to work through that struggle and self doubt together.
Both of us are established in our careers and are at the same mental place right now: holding steady and keeping on top of our financial goals is good enough. We aren’t feeling any desire to climb ladders and be ambitious. Surely that’s because we’re living the survival lifestyle right now, just making it day to day, but also, maybe that’s where we are with our life priorities and that’s ok too. It would take LOT more money, twice as much as least, to make it worth making our lives any little bit more challenging and even then I’d think twice. Maybe double the money isn’t worth it even if it gets us to any goals faster because money can’t directly buy rest or sanity and that’s all I want right now: my family to be safe from medical long term effects of COVID and for us adults not to go stark raving before things get better.
I’ve done a lot of self reflection with therapy in the last few years. Don’t love what I see, but seeing it is one of the most important reasons I’ve made any progress. Seeing my past for what it was, seeing how “funny” stories actually affected my thinking and my attitudes. I have a ways to go still but this has been good for me in ways I never thought possible.
Living in 2022 feels absolutely surreal most days.
Big picture: We lost Roe v Wade and much of the Democratic leadership has been hair-pulling-out frustrating in response. I see how other rights are under threat and it feels like if things are going to get better, it’ll be a long time coming and a lot of people are going to get hurt along the way.
In big and small ways, the losses from this time of COVID are still reverberating and I can’t understand how so many people are just absolutely impervious to the notion that a million people plus have died whether COVID related or not. Hell, my own circles are now at 10 deaths over 19 months. That’s not normal. That’s so much loss.
So much has changed drastically in a short time and people just want to go back to some normal that was never really good anyway. I wish we had more collective desire to have vision for a better future.
Small picture, well. There’s stress and cracks in the system everywhere. We see it in the daycare center being at 3/4 capacity for many reasons, but most particularly lack of staffing. We see it in the community programs that are so oversubscribed that they won’t even wait-list us. We see it in the inability to buy a car without paying a giant premium we aren’t willing to spend. We see it in the choices we have to make about travel because so many around us only care about themselves and won’t mask or vaccinate. Or our choices to see family, if we see them, because some of them don’t take illness seriously at all and so I guess we just don’t have a whole branch of family until we have enough personal protection in place. It doesn’t matter to them, I guess. I miss my dear friends who have been, in some way, deeply affected by the stressors of these years and have gone offline. I miss feeling like we belonged and feeling connected to people we care about.
The big hurts and the little hurts all add up.
I take comfort in my little family here, my chosen family who remain supportive, but it’s truly a strange time in life right now.
Also? I’m about to have a second grader and I truly can’t comprehend THAT. 👀
January 25, 2022
Welcome to our fifth year supporting families on the Pine Ridge Reservation Okini! I never would have thought we’d be doing this five years later but this amazing community really comes together every year and I appreciate y’all deeply!
Some background on this amazing project:
In 2018, a small group of us came together to give holiday gifts to Lakota families. In 2019, I organized, this time earlier in the year, and expanded to include holiday needs.
The goal for 2020 became to make this a year-round project and amid COVID sweeping the world, pregnancy, and a tumultous Presidential election year in the United States, we put $2153.05 to work responding to ten separate requests for aid.
I kicked off 2021 with a boatload of goods to the Allen Youth Center dedicated to helping Lakota youth specifically: diapers, wipes, body soap, shampoo and conditioner. We ended the year with gifts to the Youth Center for the holidays – almost. It turns out that folks had more to give through the end of the year and we helped another family with much needed diapers before I had to take a break.
All told in 2021, we deployed $6606 responding to 18 requests and helping over 60 people. What a year.
This year I am tweaking it a little bit. Last year I sent around a last call for the start of November and then… we just kept rolling anyway! I’m not going to turn down resources to help people, but at some point I do have to take a break.
I will accept donations all year round and the cut off date will only apply to the shopping part. Anything that isn’t spent on 2022 families will roll over to 2023 families.
I hope you can join me and/or share the project!
You can make contributions to ….
1. My Ko-Fi page (note: Ko-Fi flows through Paypal so they do take fees out of what you send)
Update: AGSL’s PayPal can’t receive friends and family gifts anymore so we’re updating contribution methods soon!
:: Contributors get first updates by email, and I include some details in my monthly money reports afterwards.
October 18, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 211: Smol woke up at 245 needing a diaper change, overfull and leaking diapers has been the problem this week. After a change and patting, they went back into the crib. Except that was insufficient service and they demanded my presence for another rocking on the shoulder song before they’d go to sleep peacefully. Terrorist. (Which is weird BTW, when they are being settled for a nap, they just want to be put down, they don’t want any cuddling.)
*****
I hit my tipping point on clutter and had to do some real tidying today: I put away all the baby veggies and cleared out JB’s now 2-3 year old Halloween, Christmas and Easter candy stash. I left a few pieces that weren’t too old. I ate their Oreos. Best by Jan 2021? Eh they were fine.
Took out an armload of recycling: plastic and paper containers that had been lingering and almost finished packing up a care package I’ve been working on for a friend’s little one. That one can go soon.
*****
We had my Hainan chicken and rice batch cooking failure turned porridge for dinner. It works great as a porridge so I guess we can call it a transformed meal rather than a failed one. Even Smol likes it!
Speaking of Smol, this little smudge decided they have a top tooth and a bottom tooth, they can bite food now! And they can! We learned this when they snatched a quesadilla from me and took the tiniest little chunk out of it. They glowed with pride and satisfaction.
*****
We’ve had another loss and I’m at a loss for what to say.
It feels like we have barely had time to cope with any one of the losses in the year. The cumulative weight of all of them together is simply too much.
(more…)
July 27, 2021
Or is this just the pandemic? How can we even tell?
My current job pays decent money and I have the accommodations that I need. I’m treated with respect, my staff are treated with respect, and my voice is heard. I’m genuinely good at the work I do and the work does matter in the world, to some real extent. I don’t want to have to find a new job or make the compromises that I’ve had to make at every other job.
So this is a not-awesome thing to feel: I don’t want to work. I am so tired of making my life and energy fit around work. I also can’t help but wonder how much longer I can ride this wave with this job. I would need my bosses not to do anything stupid for the next ten years. That seems like a really long time to hope they don’t make any changes I hate.
A friend reminds me that having the kids off to school will likely change the landscape too, which could influence how I feel, and maybe that’s part of the pressure cooker feeling: I have to do ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME right now.
Maybe when daycare is back and school is in session and my daylight hours are mine again, maybe I won’t hate spending those hours working.
I want to do nothing useful for at least six months. Just read and eat and walk the dogs and sleep. Maybe even twelve months. Then I will want to do something that feels good to me, and something that makes money. Maybe it’d be nice if they were the same thing. But I have zero desire to go from a reasonably comfortable good fit job to entrepreneurship if we actually need the money to live. That’s too much pressure of a different kind. I’d like to have enough saved that I don’t have to compromise on our standard of living and make real money without depending on it. Is that too much to ask? (When you factor in the part where I have no idea what I’d want to do and I don’t want to do anything I’m really good at professionally because I don’t love any of those tasks…. Yes. Yes that is asking too much.)
Segue into thinking about planning for financial independence: number crunching is my attempt at stress relief but it’s just fake endorphin juicing. Diving into the spreadsheet burrow and inputting a series of equations to game out possibilities temporarily generates a sense of accomplishment, a sense that I’m doing something to get us closer to the nebulous goal in the future when we know that the crunching alone can only draw a roadmap. It can’t move the game pieces around. Then the hit wears off and I’m deflated again because I can only do what I’m already doing: earning W-2 income, be here for my family, spend judiciously, invest regularly. Try not to freak out about the stock market highs that seem outrageous and overvalued.
Sometime in the last three cycles last week, one new realization dawned on me.
We are currently careful with our money, though we do enjoy creature comforts, so we can save aggressively. We save aggressively so we’ll have plenty of money in the future, we hope, to live off of for as long as we need it (we hope). My simulations are based on quite high annual spending projections to, as best I can, ensure that when we choose to step away from our jobs, we have the freedom to keep spending if we want to or have to. I don’t want to go back to worrying about money. Except, if we’re being honest, I’m always thinking about money now so why would that change later when I have more time on my hands? It won’t. I love thinking about money.
I’ve been thinking about how many early-retired people caution others not to rush to early retirement and to enjoy the journey there. Carl of 1500Days recently said: “All of this money stuff is fun to think about, but the real goal is to enjoy life. If you’re so obsessed with winning the money game that you forget to enjoy life, you’ve lost. I know this from experience. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone slower. Hell, I might of actually still been working.”
I get the point. I haven’t forgotten to live today in pursuit of the far-off tomorrow like I once did. PiC and I spend money on things that make us comfortable (insulation!) and happy (cool stamps! special cheese!) and sane (childcare! again! someday!). I even dumped our rental because it was eating my sanity and happiness. We aim for an equal amount of removing alligators and adding kittens. We’re doing the best we can without sacrificing the important things of today. But I can’t help quietly fretting over our savings rate. It feels like we’re creeping along at a snail’s pace and it feels like we’re not going to get there “in time.” My health is improving with therapy and exercise and diet changes, but it’s still a vast gulf between where I am now and being healthy, free of constant pain and fatigue, with energy.
It feels like I’m not doing enough. It feels like there’s so much more I should be doing to grow this nest egg exponentially so that we don’t run out of good years and money to support those years. This year’s rash of losses underline the fact that while we ARE living today, we also don’t know how many more todays we have. I don’t want to spend the majority of them working, and I don’t want to run out of the freedom (aka money) to enjoy life today and tomorrow and next year. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope.
:: How are you feeling at this stage of life with your job and your future plans?
October 20, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
Week 31 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 31, Day 213: We had a talk with JB’s tutor about the two priorities we’re balancing: academics vs structure. Structure is the part that they have always had with daycare scheduling to prepare them for the way a traditional classroom is run, vs the learning itself (academics).
Kindergarten completely lacks consistency and structure. We never know what they’re going to be doing at any given time of the class session, or even what time the class will end. Daycare was incredibly structured down to the five minute mark and we always knew what they were expected to be doing at any point in the day. Our tutor expressed concern that if JB were to continue on a trajectory where they are academically a grade level or two above their current grade but continue to lack that ability to handle the structure, skipping a grade would be a real problem. We appreciated that insight but we realize that JB’s social development isn’t progressing at a pace that I would think skipping grades could work well for them in the next year or two. That could change, but at the moment, with the few opportunities they have to socialize, I have my doubts it’ll shift much over the next year.
We decided that within the tutoring session, focusing on the academics will be our higher priority. PiC and I will continue to work on balancing flexibility and structure across the whole day so that they aren’t completely feral by the time first grade starts.
Today I introduced a short post-kindergarten class exercise session. We took the dogs outside for a very short walk to a safe part of the street where I could send JB to do wind sprints. I posed this as their “real dog owner training”. They need to build up strength and stamina if they’re going to have a hope of keeping up with running Sera one of these days. Then they get to do a quiet activity of their choice for up to 40 minutes, followed up by an assigned chore. We’ll go into lunch and rest time before their afternoon educational session from there. (more…)
October 12, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,816.35; Rural libraries, $346.69
I’m trying to decide what to do with our travel cards – we routinely use the Marriott Bonvoy and CSR cards. Broadly speaking, I don’t see us using the Marriott free night to offset the annual fee anytime soon, and we aren’t going to get our money’s worth out of the CSR anytime soon either. I prefer to only have two active keeper cards so I need to do some in depth research here.
American Express
Replacing the Marriot Bonvoy?
I intend to stick with AmEx because their customer service has always been good to us, but does carrying on my usual hotel points hoarding makes any sense given we have no intention of traveling for probably a year.
Perhaps it’s time to downgrade the card to something without a fee. The best of both worlds would be an AmEx with great earning potential and slightly better cashing out options.
They have stated: Points expiration is paused until February 2021. Starting February 2021, points will begin to expire 24 months after your last activity.
That’s good. I’m not worried about expiration right now since we continue to earn points every month but I will have to remember we have 2 years after I change cards to have activity on the account.
Initial Research for replacements: Meh.
Cash Magnet: 1.5% cash back on everything, redeemable as statement credits whenever reward balance is $25 or more (meh). Free ShopRunner membership. No annual fee 👍🏻, 2.7% foreign transaction fee 👎🏻.
AmEx EveryDay card: 1 point/$ on all purchases; 2 points/$ on groceries; 20% more points when the card is used 20+ times per billing period less returns and credits. No annual fee 👍🏻, 2.7% foreign transaction fee 👎🏻.
Blue Cash Preferred® Card: 6% Cash Back at U.S. Supermarkets (capped); 3% cash back on Transit; 3% cash back on Gas; 1% On Other Purchases redeemable as a statement credit. Annual Fee: $95 (meh), 2.7% foreign transaction fee 👎🏻.
Blue Cash Everyday® Card: 3% Cash Back at U.S. Supermarkets (capped); 2% cash back on Gas; 1% On Other Purchases redeemable as a statement credit (meh). No annual fee 👍🏻, 2.7% foreign transaction fee 👎🏻.
Chase
Replacing the Chase Sapphire Reserve?
I’m far less attached to Chase. Their customer service isn’t much use. I enjoyed the CSR card for a while because they had a decent set of perks but those perks are declining in real life value.
I do like that Ultimate Rewards can be cashed out and that I have some reasonable flexibility in earning potential. Perhaps this current stash should just be cashed out and this card downgraded as well. Once upon a time, I was happy with the Chase Freedom card, the current Chase Freedom Unlimited might work for us. I like the flat 1.5% cashback, I dislike the foreign transaction fees. I won’t need to worry about that any time soon but I typically plan for the long haul with keeper cards (vs churn cards I don’t care about).
I haven’t had time to do any Chase related research but I am willing to consider ditching Chase entirely and using our Citi Costco as a regular keeper card to save me the trouble of thinking about this too hard. The perks aren’t as varied but that may not matter much since we haven’t been using many of Chase’s perks lately.
I did like getting the choice to redeem points at 1.5x for restaurant purchases but I didn’t end up doing too much of that. I suppose I’d just rather have the cash in hand.
:: Do you have a favorite go to card that you’d recommend?
August 21, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. We finally caught the edge of a heat wave and part of me was really happy because it’s cold here 98% of the time. I appreciate what we have – we never have to worry about anything melting when we leave it out for example – but I do love a hot day or two once in a while to break it up. I bask in the glory of being too warm because it’s so rare.
2. The hot days also meant we could finally easily bathe the dogs! It’s so hard for Seamus to stand for long periods of time now. On a hot day, he can go for a bit of a walk and hang out and dry quickly. On a cold day, he needs to be blow dried and that’s just so hard on his arthritic joints. All credit goes to PiC on that chore.
3. JB is in really good spirits about the upcoming school year, no matter what form it takes. The nice thing about how hard it’s been up til now – it’s left us all with a complete lack of expectations (other than that it may be a circus). If it’s better than a disaster, great. If not, we’ll figure it out.
4. Speaking of PiC being great, he’s taking the whole first week of school off work so he can be there to oversee and assist. I definitely could not do that even though I had originally really wanted to take the day before and the first day off to be mentally and physically present. My staff needed the time off at the same time and since they booked it first, I wasn’t going to stress the rest of the team with my absence too. We have a lot of flexibility but we still have to get the work done and I have some bigger life balance goals to achieve in the long term so having PiC there instead should do the trick.
Challenges this week: The heat did a number on my hands, much as the rest of me enjoyed it. They were swollen like oven mitts! But it was a small price to pay. We also had another hiccup with the rental and the property manager and that ate up another precious couple of hours of my work time. I ended the week on a low note: with at least half a day of work that I’d have to make up next week or on the weekend. That was disheartening. I like to walk away on a Friday night and know I don’t feel any need to come back until Monday. Also can we take a moment to reflect that we’re five plus months into a pandemic, plus we have heat waves, plus rolling blackouts because PG&E stinks, plus wildfires. I had to shut all the windows that were letting in the cool air, thus avoiding the need to run fans, because of the smoke. There’s a fair bit of coping whiplash in our corner of the world.
5. I made the call to list our rental for sale. It stopped being fun years ago and while I’ve been learning a lot, the biggest things I’ve learned are that I don’t enjoy dealing with an investment that requires me to talk to people. Ever. I also don’t enjoy the people by and large. It was a grand experiment and I still do believe strongly in affordable housing but I also can’t be the one to offer it when we cannot easily absorb the costs of a wrecked property. If we were multiple times richer, that wouldn’t bother me but at this stage in our financial lives, that’s not a hit we can just shrug off without impacting our long term plans. I believe in prompt service and taking really good care of the property for the tenants and that didn’t align with my past sets of tenants. So I’m hugely relieved to have made the decision that it’s ok to end this experiment here and take a part time job off my plate. I don’t know how quickly it will sell but I’m crossing my fingers that it goes for a good price and smoothly and quickly. I’m ready to move on. And that’s ok!
6. We had a distanced and masked activity with a couple of friends. We have seen them a few times since March, just for quick porch and distanced drop offs of food gifts, but nothing like spending actual time together. We haven’t spent time with anyone in five months, really. I didn’t think it bothered me at all, and maybe it doesn’t specifically bother me, but the lack of fun times means I haven’t replenished my spirit in nearly half a year. I’ve just been coping day to day to day to endless day. I couldn’t believe what an enormous difference it made in my ability to breathe and be patient to have even distanced company for a while and be relaxed with friends and laughing over silly things. Even aching from head to toe with the unexpected physical exertion, I had reserves of patience for JB that I have been searching for for months. I both felt elated and bad that I can’t maintain that much patience normally but it’s just an honest indicator of how depleted I’ve been. Whether it was the fun activity or the company or both, we need more of this.
:: How was your week?