About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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May 18, 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, $1551.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” G.K. Chesterton
Unless you’re JB. In which case, every story with a villain is an infomercial for that villain and their scariness. Every morning and evening, I hear a shriek:
Mommy, I’m scared, (evil villain) is going to get me!
I always intended to put JB in self defense classes but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. And now, of course, it’s not possible to start for a while.
The fear bothered me because I realized JB is a freeze on fear kid. As far back as I can remember, I have been a fight on fear kid, which may or may not have been trained into me by a mean older sibling, but this served me well.
I was bullied at every single school I attended. I always had to put some bully in their place when they tried me and things were much better when I was able to do so quickly and decisively. I only ever had to deal with each bully once, they weren’t used to being shut down effectively and violently.
We have now implemented Monster Training. After reading age appropriate books about kids fighting monsters, I proposed that we take turns scaring each other and learning to fight back. The whole goal for me is to teach them to get scared and then act, not just freezing.
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May 15, 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, $1,051.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. PiC and JB teamed up to make me sugar free, gluten free, keto cinnamon rolls and they’re great! I’ve been craving them for months. (Correction: they weren’t keto. They do need to be so I’ll be fiddling with the recipe some more.)
2. My Mother’s Day was spent tackling a part of the yard that has also been bothering me for weeks. I did a big chunk of it on my own in blessed quiet, such a soothing activity to chop and prune back the overgrowth.
Then PiC and JB came out to help for an hour. We got so much more done than I had originally envisioned. My arms may fall off and my back may not work for a week BUT IT IS CLEANED UP. WOOOOO!!
3. We were able to help out a couple more Lakota families (but we ran out of money before I could get the laundry detergent and sheets, sadly).
Challenges this week: JB was really struggling to be human this week. I felt like an anxious pile of sludge, making half my food taste like soap or just nothing.
4. I skipped therapy this week because I’ve been so physically drained and ill that I couldn’t pull myself together to do hard brain work. It was the right call.
5. This bit of genius led to an easy experiment.
I poured the blended ricotta into two small Pyrexes and ended up with two baked ricottas that were pretty good!
It was mostly not sweet (on purpose) and I couldn’t taste the lemon juice or the vanilla. On review, it seems I should have just picked one or the other. Next time I’ll try lemon juice and lemon extract. Next time after that, I’m going to skip the sugar entirely and blend in a little bit of mango if we have it on hand. What flavors would you try?
:: What good things have you enjoyed this week, big or small?
May 14, 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, $659.86; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Because JB hasn’t even started school yet and we’re both enormously lucky enough to be home but working full time, we have taken a similar approach to the notion of homeschooling. I know my friends in other states are worn OUT with homeschooling similar aged children and I just don’t see the value in spending your interminable days with your five year old trying to force them to do schoolwork when we’re all stressed out of our minds. We do have a little schooling happening with a professional, and the rest of the time is JB requesting worksheets, doing art, using their imagination, solving puzzles, learning fractions with food, learning to ride a bike, to be independent, and being creative. The fights are far fewer than when they were in school. Go figure. (Though we are not fight and tantrum free at all.)
Asians and Asian Americans: how to practice allyship with the Black community in our racist society
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
I doff my hat to Tami and her handiness. She built a bed for her dogs that’s pretty cool.
Stockdale Paradox
This REALLY resonates with me (whole thread here). I won’t even engage in “what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get out” thinking because that’s (for me) too close to the “we’re getting out by….” speculation. I cannot do that and still get through this day to day to day stuff.
May 11, 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, $1,021.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 7 and 8 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
We have a bit of a routine now. Mornings: Walk dogs, feed dogs, breakfast. JB has a lesson online, PiC and I work during that period (I oversee the lesson just as a behavior monitor.) Usually they are released to go hang out with PiC for a snack and games after the lesson unless he has conference calls. Afternoon: Lunch, I wander out after I’ve cleared the critical parts of my work (if I’m lucky). I’m juggling my work, training new staff, giving feedback, overseeing policy issues and questions plus the usual household stuff: ordering supplies, watching our spending, thinking about how to organize our lives a little bit better.
Week 7, Day 1: I had to run an important errand today and it threw my entire work groove out of whack. It took hours to get focused on work again, and before I knew it, I was derailed again by fatigue. Rude.
I did get lucky with the weather though! The sun was shining fiercely enough to be warm even with the usual gusty wintry winds we get through our neighborhood, so I set up camp in the garage for a couple hours to get “beach weather” while working. Ahhhh….. The change of scenery really did my mind and body good. I still felt ill and tired, but it did boost my spirits for a good hour and I’m grateful for it.
Week 7, Day 2:
I had to get checked out today and that was really weird. My second solo outing in two days, after 40 days of being home and around the neighborhood only on short walks, and I was feeling such strangeness of being out and about when the world is so altered. Seeing and talking to people at the doctor’s office was also incredibly strange. Some people were reassuring, some people were brusque and off-putting. Some people were slightly hysterical about the medical building’s policies.
One enormous sigh of relief: The possible crisis with PiC’s job blew over. We will be seeing some changes in May, details still unknown, but I’m so many kinds of grateful that it’s not the layoff that we were concerned about.
I’m thinking about how my mentor used to tease me about my 12 month cash emergency fund. She considered it excessive. It could be excessive for her with her very very stable job but I remember the Great Recession far too clearly not to want an 18-24 month cash fund. THAT was probably too much, though, considering how behind I have been with investing for the future. On the one hand, yes it was important to get off my caboose and invest. The habit was the important thing. On the other hand, considering last year’s high prices, I may have been better served if I had held on to the 18-24 month cash and invested a portion of it this year. Wait. No. That’s not true. In a pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to let go of the cash and I still wouldn’t have made any inroads into our investing goals. Never mind. Hindsight fails to account for the behavioral changes I needed to make.
Anyway. The point is, if we hadn’t had a year of cash in hand, that concern over PiC’s job earlier this month would have been full blown panic. Facing one income when we need 2 to cover our expenses, less than a year of cash, the stock market down, and being stuck at home during a pandemic? Nope. No way. Eliminating one of those four factors as an issue made a big difference. Going down to one job with 12 months cash would let us hold out for about 18 months before having to sell stocks. If facing a recession and a down market, the longer we can wait to tap those stocks, the better.
Of course I don’t know what the heck the market is doing now or why.
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May 8, 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, $659.86; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. Finally, a gluten free low carb no sugar bread for me! I replaced the oil with bacon fat, the honey with sugar replacement and just recklessly added walnuts to the dry ingredients. Fabulous. I piled fresh Brie and sugar free jam atop each toasted slice and four slices later, admitted that that was lunch.
2. Someone who loves me decided that I was in need of delicious dumplings and salt and pepper tofu and made that happen. They were right.
Challenges this week: loved ones are getting furloughed or being laid off, and another loved one is undergoing diagnostics for what the doctors suspect is cancer and there’s very little we can to do change their circumstances. We can just be there for them from afar.
3. Jenny reminded me that I love looking at fabrics: jellyfish, constellation animals, and CAT NOODLE. I really wish I were handier with a needle and thread to justify buying these ultra cute fabrics.
4. I also love looking at bento boxes. I’m not all inspired to do any of the work but I adore looking at other people’s creativity and ideas.
5. I’m practicing gratitude: for relatively decent health, for financial stability, for a loving chosen family.
:: How are you keeping healthy and occupied?
May 7, 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, $659.86; Rural libraries, $321.62.
How Baby comic hits the Mom thing precisely: “mothers are under inescapable pressure to perform to impossible standards.”
It’s nice that there are still good people out there.
Speaking of good, I couldn’t read the WaPo article that Abby linked to (over my limit?) but I did find another recent article confirming the Burnell Colton and his Lower 9th Ward Market is still helping their community even though he’s not being paid, so I also sent him a check to help out. If you also want to help a helper: Burnell’s Lower 9th Ward Market, 2036 Caffin Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117
Ana’s All The Hats resonated so strongly with me.
Does everyone have a favorite period of art? I just do not.
Why we’re staying home.
Since this all started I firmly believed we need to test test test. It’s not just for statistics, it informs actions. The folks in Groningen felt the same way and it looks like this is working out well. Most crucially, I think, they actually care about saving lives which is far more than I can say for the US government: “Herd immunity can never be a public health strategy. It can never be controlled, and it means people will die, and if you are not very careful a lot of people will die,” Friedrich said.
“It’s not a law that we’re all going to get infected. It’s just the consequences of our insufficient action to protect people.”
Young Barley and Ethel
May 4, 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, $659.86; Rural libraries, $321.62.
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from an investment property (which is all saved for maintenance) and investing in dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks and cash back sites (Ebates, Mr.Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working.I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $193.60 in dividends in April.
Federal taxes. I’m glad we filed on the last day of March. I know there was no rush with the deadline delay to July 15th but we were due a federal refund and I wanted our money before the virus spread brought the IRS to some kind of grinding halt. Our deposit arrived in about ten days so I stashed it immediately to pay for our CA tax bill in the summer. I’m not paying that until July. We have a little extra after we deduct our state taxes, but I consider that money already spent. I’ve been hearing reports from other bloggers that they’d filed much earlier but they were being asked for ID, birth certificates, etc, and their refunds are indefinitely held up. What gives?? What has your experience been with your tax refund?
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