Good Things Friday (96) and Link Love
December 18, 2020
1. We were introduced to birria de res tacos. Absolutely decadent and delicious and wowwww so good!
2. I updated our Life-Death Summary records that contains (almost) any and all information needed when one of us passes on. I haven’t done a full update in over a year so it was well overdue. Also there were incomplete sections, so I’ve added an insurance section with the link to submit a claim for my life insurance. Still are – I will need to add our disability and his life insurance information too. This gives me peace of mind.
3. We are getting a small year-end bonus this year. That’s not a given in any year, so getting one this year is especially nice so we can continue to help others. While I’m working so hard at building our financial foundation, I also need to keep exercising our giving muscles.
4. I renewed this domain again with a 20% off coupon code. Why not?
5. I finally sat down and organized the last box to ship to our tenth and final Lakota family. This one had some baby clothes, hygiene kit, blankets and things for mom’s recovery after the baby arrives. I wanted to put a few more things in but I was really pushing the limit on our ability to tape that flat rate box shut!
Challenges this week: Seamus is really looking old and tottery this week. I’m not sure he’s got much time left.
I’m not a positive thinking person but I’m going to attempt to shift my perspective on the neighbors causing problems from “I hate them” to “we’re lucky we can afford this project and some hiccups are inevitable”.
Mama Purple talks about her later start with investing and retiring. I often feel bad for losing a lot of investing time in my 20s and 30s where I didn’t have the cash to spare or retirement accounts to take advantage of. While our circumstances are totally different (I still have many years of supporting dependents to go), it’s nice to see that the basic principles still work out for people to retire with some time to enjoy life.
Yet Another PF Blog reviews Daily Harvest, a meal service, we might consider trying when life inevitably gets even more hectic.
A useful Twitter thread on the COVID vaccine from someone who was initially hesitant and did a lot of digging into the background
“Regarding Your Application Status”, John Scalzi (short story)
JUPITER AND SATURN ALIGN IN THE SKY, THEIR CLOSEST APPROACH TO EACH OTHER IN 400 YEARS
A really weird article about LinkedIn which is appropriate because LinkedIn is itself really weird.
Hanukkah Is a Hardcore Badass Holiday That’s Perfect for the Pandemic Age: The wild thing is, Hanukkah isn’t even that central a holiday to the Jewish faith, but it does pretty neatly sum up our whole deal. An external force tried to wipe the Jewish people off the map, and our reaction is: “This shit again?”
I’m terribly tempted by these adorable Bunnerfly placemats from Heather Sketcheroos.
I smile to see the “life-death summary” in a “good things” post, although I totally get it. You make me want to go update mine. My kids and husband, though, want no part of it. They don’t at all like thinking about messy admin stuff, or what happens if I get struck by a meteor. All the more reason to pull this info together in an easily readable space, I figure.
We are not getting bonuses — in fact, my college announced that all of their retirement contributions will be put on hold for 6 months to get us through the current budget crunch. I was really impressed that one of our employees asked, “If we’re already maxing out our own side of the retirement contributions, can we take a salary cut and have the college contribute that amount to retirement?”. I’m pretty sure the answer is “no”, but it was nice to see that I’m not the only frugal nut at my college. I do feel for the people who are younger, though: I know this is a big hit for them.
I know it’s no FUN but it’s the one thing we can definitely count on having to deal with at some point in some shape or fashion so why not make it easier for the family members who are left? I can’t imagine my family having to try to make head or tails of their financial situation without my guidance and that’s exactly what they would be doing if I didn’t get these summaries together for them.
That was a really resourceful suggestion from your colleague, I hope the university is willing to at least consider it!
We are very fortunate that we’ve been able to maintain our revenue a variety of ways, not least of which was a project that I’d been running on top of my normal workload, and were able to show monetary appreciation to all the employees with a small bonus this year. I’m very grateful.