1. Friday: I finally grew a brain. Instead of getting up super early (for me), then being frustrated that I couldn’t wake JB up for 20-30 minutes because ze still needs more sleep, I just went straight to work and got a bunch of critical stuff off my plate. Then I went to tackle the sleeping dragon.
3. Saturday: We didn’t plan on it but we had the afternoon free to support PiC at a memorial event that went twice as long as we expected. JB was in good spirits and we had just enough supplies to keep zir fed and occupied, luckily. Physically, I was thrashed afterward for days, but it was an important thing for us to have done together.
4. Sunday: Working on the weekend is not a fun thing but I was glad to get through a few hours of work this morning so I could spend the afternoon doing fun things without stressing over the bad Monday to come.
6. Monday: Sunday’s work made SUCH a difference to my work day. I don’t want to always require weekend work but I will build on this momentum. Also I’m proud that I’ve consistently checked on Friend 1 (a dear friend going through some really tough life stuff right now) consistently every week this year.
7. Tuesday: The past 10 weeks have been ultra-stressful for work reasons but also for personal reasons. A friend’s wife has been an absolute snake to us, actively stirring the pot and having tantrums worthy of 45. Because we’re unable to cut her out of our lives for a specific period of time, due to prior commitments that are bigger than us, we’ve been dealing with her shenanigans for the short term. I realized this week that it was really getting to me, priming my brain for drama every day, so I actively decided today that it doesn’t matter what she thinks or wants or has a hissy over, she simply does not exist today. Or tomorrow. Or the rest of this week. Even after another bout with insomnia last night, I can feel that decision actively reducing my stress.
9. Wednesday: I slept well enough to wake up early all on my own this morning! If I can keep this up through next winter, we can skip forking over a great deal of money for the daylight alarm clock I was considering. Come to think, this might actually be related to some spring/summer weather? If so, I may just be putting off the inevitable for another year but that’s fine.
10. Thursday: I got SO MANY things done today but most importantly, I actually had an appetite for the first time in three weeks.
This winter (December through March) was a lot less reading and lot more doing things but that wasn’t correlated – I don’t have time to read during the day!
It was just a coincidence that I ran short on reading material, needed more sleep, and had resolved to try to do one social thing per month all around the same time.
What I read
Tanja Hester, Work Optional – a fantastic book on the ideas and math behind early retirement, not just how fun it is.
J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Parts One and Two
I’m unwilling to spend any more money on Rowling’s franchise, she’s become deeply problematic over the years and probably always has been, but a friend lent me their copy of the book and I was curious. NOW I understand why another friend likes Scorpius.
Patricia Briggs. I’m well into this series mostly because of momentum and availability. Our library has a lot of the ebooks and hasn’t gotten a lot of the books I do want. But the social structure in her world is squicky.
I knew Ashley Ford’s name first on Twitter as @ismashfizzle because she does good work for the world there but here’s another facet to love: her interview with Michelle Yeoh.
“America First” – not my America. This piece was hugely resonant for me as a child of immigrants, knowing how much the generation of parent-immigrants gave up in order to give us a better life. I still feel that sense of gratitude even if my own remaining parent has turned out to be a terrible person. It’s weird but I do.
Golden Globes
I don’t watch awards shows but I will watch Sandra Oh in pretty much anything. And Samberg is hilarious. This monologue made me laugh out loud. And they cut to her mom.
I’ve almost closed out the 2018 budget but there’s one last check to be cashed from December 1st (when is it ok to tell someone to take their damn money already??)
I was fortunate enough to have a choice between maxing out our IRAs this year right away or investing more in our brokerage so I did the former to get it out of our hair.
I’ve calculated our expected cash flow for the first three months of 2019 and scheduled automatic savings to reflect that.
I’ve calculated our expected large expenses for the year and scheduled automatic savings to cover them over the course of the year.
What’s left?
Mostly the everyday things.
Working my job every day with attendant frustrations so I can keep earning that paycheck that feeds our savings and investing.
Feeding my family – meal planning, grocery shopping, thinking about diet stuff.
Walking the dogs – training Sera, making sure Seamus has every possible health need covered.
Making sure to the best of our abilities that JB grows up to be a good and decent human. We also need to get zir into some sports and activities to be a bit more well-rounded and make a few more friends.
Reading all the good books I can reach (more more more!)
We’ve got one big trip for later this year to be planned out. After that? Probably staying close to home for a while. Now that Seamus is showing his age (his hearing is suspect, his eyesight seems to be less sharp, he’s definitely much crankier) we’re going to curtail international travel so we can spend this time with him.
These are good things. I’m enjoying them. I’d like to enjoy more of them. I’d like to be out in the garden ripping out the rest of those weeds now that the rains have softened the previously rock hard ground.
I should be pretty content.
Instead, the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessively sitting here staring at our accounts, glaring at them to sprout 100x their income as if Power Stare is a method of investment growth (it’s not). I’ve been cranky and impatient. (more…)
Mini-windfall, Tweetchat: The random number generator loved me and gave me a win for the many tweetchats I’ve participated in this year, a big Amazon gift card! Woo! This will be really helpful to defray normal household costs – I’ve got a huge list of things we’ve been holding off on buying until we have the money for it and we’ll get a few of them. I’ve also allocated a small part of it to buy one random person in need of help a small gift from their wishlist because I believe in passing on the luck / love.
Dividend income. This was a huge month for dividends: $504.44 which is our highest month of the year. It’s just the way the quarterly dividends shake out. Most months are typically around $200 but they’ve grown little by little each month. Our year to date net dividends are now $2,855.80. We don’t spend our dividends, these go right back to work for us purchasing more shares of something.
PiC and I grew up eating tv dinners, fast food from McDonald’s and the like, and all kinds of other junk food. I still have a nostalgic yearning for those Jeno’s frozen pizzas, we used to buy a huge stack of them at a time for $1 each. Or the cheap Chinese takeout from the place across the street from high school, we’d swing by there on the way home and for $5 fill up our tanks to the brim with the veggie medley, orange chicken and chow mein. (I miss chow mein.)
It was cheap easy sustenance, if not quite nutritious. We both had parents who worked away from the home and while my mom cooked hot dinners for us every night (in addition to working 15 hour days, thanks for the help Dad) we were mostly on our own during the day once we could be trusted to be home alone.
I learned to cook basics very early – rice in the rice cooker by 4 or 5, boil water for hot tea and ramen, scrambled eggs or eggs over easy on the stovetop by 6 or 7. The frozen food life started in our preteens and my addiction to boxed cake mix started right around then as well. As a teenager, my Saturday (late) morning breakfast treat to myself was a fry-up: french toast, scrambled eggs, whatever else that could be fried. The idea NOW makes my stomach turn a little bit because I remember how much grease was in there!
PiC started on a healthy food kick in his mid 20s, and my acquiesance to the whole thing started in my late 20s, so now we’re largely a healthy foods family. That’s not to say that our diet is totally boring, it’s not! At least it’s not because of choosing to be healthier. For that, I just find ways to reduce saturated fats and increase vitamins, minerals, and other good things for a balanced diet. It IS boring in that I rotate the same 20-30 recipes depending on what I can think of and what’s in season. (more…)
Last summer, I talked about how we made it work around here and I think it’s worth revisiting a year, and a lot more stressors, later.
We’ve been settled into the new home for a year now – thank everything for being done with the massive renovations. We’ve been ignoring all the other projects around the house that need doing for a while just to recoup our savings and sanity.
We still manage with just the two of us: working, parenting, maintaining a semblance of a personal life. I continue to blog, albeit a bit less with my job problems, and added a monthly massage to help alleviate my pain. He has picked up a hobby again and we try to ensure he gets out at least once a weekend for exercise, during which time JB and I spend quality time together. Mostly we spend that time cleaning and puttering around the house but once in a while we can have a friend visit. We are adding some visits of our own to PiC’s friends we don’t see nearly often enough.
Last year, we added one chauffeur day to my schedule but PiC needed some more him-time so I now have two designated drop off days.
Babysitting: We tend to avoid babysitting because at $25/hour, it REALLY has to be worth it but we’ve been terrible about hiring the sitter for anything. Maybe we should have tried for our anniversary? It’s felt desperately needed and yet we don’t really have any space for it to happen. (more…)
I’m having a bit of a patience problem.
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