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
I forgot to mention some of these in April’s update so I’m taking credit this month!
Craiglist Sales. PiC had some luck offloading some of our spare parts. That brought in a small handful of cash: $40.
Legal settlement. I got an unexpectedly large check for a lawsuit for a brand of dog food that we’d bought for years. It turns out that not enough people claimed their share so my check was almost twice the amount originally projected! Score! $280.
Decluttr. I tried selling off some books and DVDs. Sadly, most of the DVDs we have aren’t desirable but oddly enough some old Meg Ryan movies were. And I sold PiC’s smashed to heck phone for a few bucks which was more than I thought we’d get: $10.
Freelancing. I picked up a little bit of freelance work. That brought in almost $400 between March and April. May was too busy with work to do much on this front but I did manage to squeeze in another $100 worth.
Do you have any pre-marriage and/or pre-kids regrets? Things you wished you’d done? I kind of wish we had traveled a little more, mostly because I now appreciate how many times simpler it was back then.
PiC and I aren’t zero-wasters but we make an effort to be as low waste as possible. Here are some of the things we’re doing now:
1. Reusable shopping bags and produce bags
I didn’t get on this bandwagon until plastic bags were banned here in Northern CA because we always reused our plastic bags for the garbage, but we had a good stash of reusable bags from Comic Con to use when that ban went into effect. We’ve also added mesh produce bags to our shopping trips to reduce the number of small veggie bags that we use, and may soon switch over to using free newspaper to line our tiny trash bins to reduce our use of plastic even more.
2. Recycle!
Everything that can be, is!
Food is kept separate from paper and plastic recycling to avoid contamination.
We have small appliance and household waste recycling through the city,
and film plastics recycling at Sprouts,
and electronic waste recycling through work.
I’ve even found textiles recycling for shoes and clothing that are simply too thrashed to be handed down or donated.
Tending to our Net Worth update, I signed in PiC’s Chase account to check some balances and my jaw dropped.
WHAT IN THE SAM HILL.
WHERE ARE MY POINTS???
I had to nag them for Six Frakkin Months to get my rightfully earned 100,000 points for opening a mortgage with Chase during their promotion for massive points for doing a thing we were already going to do.
The reasons? I have never had my earned points or miles tied to keeping an account open so it literally didn’t occur to me that they would be (even though YAPFB TOLD ME), I completely missed that we only have 30 days to cash them out in the Rewards Agreement, and … there’s no real excuse. This was my own damn fault.
Over at MarketPlace, Tanja breaks down “How to save twice your salary (or more) by age 35“. She started with a zero net worth at age 28 so she knows some things. As always, I never think “everyone can do it because I could” but rather “there’s always something we can learn, it might help”.
Roxane’s piece is painful to read. The things she has had to go through because our society is so incredibly judgemental.
Ah ha! Neuroplasticity and Novelty Effect! The reasons I keep researching tropical vacation deals, or seeking the next freelance gig, even while I’m stretched out on the sofa comfortably going about my routine and know that I can’t commit to anything like a new volunteer gig or workout routine: “….when you make time for new skills that are personally interesting to you, the benefits of success are heightened. Your body will actually release more dopamine when you achieve goals that your mind has deemed more interesting and fulfilling to your core interests and values.
….The novelty effect is a particularly strange psychological phenomenon that shines a light on just how finicky the human brain can be when it comes to feeling renewed and ready to go back to work. Research has uncovered that your performance at a task will initially improve when a new technology or process is introduced. That’s right—you can instantly get better at something old simply because your brain will be interested in the new process on the block.”
This is the last week of this food diary, and I think I’m really starting to see a difference in my baseline pain.
As Court mentioned, it does seem like my original estimate of two weeks for the de-glutening was really too short. It feels as though this entire six weeks has been necessary to get it out of my system. It could also be because it took me a few weeks to do things like avoiding cross contamination and cooking in entirely separate dishes and so on. Now I’m wondering how to make this more sustainable.
I do want to (very carefully) bake up several batches of healthy breakfast muffins for PiC and JB to have on hand, thus using up the wheat flour, before I start experimenting with alternative baking bases, and get back into the habit of baking and cooking in a GF-friendly way without having to expend a ton of thought and energy on the process. (more…)
We had four glorious days with JB. Ze was calm and cheerful, reasonable, playful and obedient. That was an amazing four days. The OTHER days were soooo much harder. The tantrums of last month? Came to stay.
Ze was so prone to melting down over the most nonsensical reasons, it was incredibly hard to grab hold of my temper with both hands and hang on tight through it all.
We had to be alert for when ze was simply being bratty or when ze was losing ability to reason and react accordingly. One bleak afternoon, overdue for a nap, ze started to melt down AGAIN because ze didn’t WANT to go to put on pajamas, didn’t WANT Daddy, WANT MOMMY! (believe me, if I was the one putting zir to bed, that would be reversed immediately), don’t WANT to read a book.
I grabbed zir vest and dug into the pockets with both hands and told zir to do the same: take out alllll that attitude. Scoop out the grumpy! Pull out all your grouchiness and whining and tears and yucky feelings and dump them on the floor here. I’ll sweep it up later. Go on, pull it all out!
On Money
Mind the 
I’m loving Angela’s 
Tending to our Net Worth update, I signed in PiC’s Chase account to check some balances and my jaw dropped.
Week 6
Meltdown city, continued