September 15, 2012
Doggle is finally learning to play a little bit.
- I’ve been chasing him around the yard when we travel to places that have yards, and he chases me in turn. Hilarity.
- He is crap at visual recognition. He couldn’t figure out that he’d knocked his toy under a piece of furniture and in his panic to find a toy, any toy, he ran to a pile of towels and tried to pick them up. No, dear, those aren’t for you.
Once in a while, I fondly look at my husband and wonder: how did we end up together? We’re so different.
- He loves Groundhog Day. I haaaaate that movie. I didn’t have an opinion on Bill Murray until that film and to this day, I have a near-allergic reaction to his character’s smarminess.
- His love of Coming to America baffles me just as much. But it doesn’t bother me.
- He’s a compulsive cleaner. I’m comfortable with cyclical cleaning or cleaning as stress relief. I did grow up stomping about barns, after all.
The new horizon is so bright and shiny. It was hell on the innards traipsing my way to the conclusion and Things To Come. But so worth it.
- A new thing to learn: pacing myself. I am so very bad at this.
- I have added at least one, sometimes two! walks to my day. That’s pretty good for a new routine where I could have backslid into none.
Finances feel neglected. Not like they’re dwindling while I’m off playing or working necessarily, just that I’m not 100% on top of every detail.
- This is true because I missed a credit card bill. Called to have the late fee waived but not within minutes.
- Karen, regular reader, tells me that HSBC notified her of intent to implement a $12 inbound transfer fee which we both think is crap. I’m not a customer though I was considering opening an account there – wonder if they followed through.
- Very happy about the salary bump though not ready to start the calculations of how far away we still are from a refinance and a small yard.
I suspect I just have brain overload at the moment – too many commitments and for the first time, my survival doesn’t depend on knowing where every penny lives. My gut still doesn’t love that idea though so it’s taking note.
August 28, 2012
I’ve used Steamy Kitchen’s Hainanese Chicken Recipe in the past, but returning to it this week, I realized that the way the recipe was organized had me running back and forth so much that I was wasting a lot of time in the kitchen. I’ve reorganized it with some of my own tweaks. (I actually never make the chili sauce. Sriracha and I are not friends.)
While I was cooking tonight, as is usual at the end of a few recipes, we ended up with a scoop and a half of leftover rice and I borrowed the broth from the recipe below to reconstitute it. Figured I had enough green onions to jazz it up a little bit as well. As I was mincing, it occurred to me that the paltry scoop of rice wasn’t going to do much for either of us, so I tripled the broth and brought it all up to a boil. My mind drifted back to a story my parents told me, of days more than thirty years gone.
Facing grinding poverty once the war was over, all the economic opportunities diverted to the hands of the Communists leaders and those who fought on the “wrong” side jailed, my family fled the country to build a better life for their children. The journey was terrible, every step of it. A forced stop in Malaysia, beached in the open air while the pirates and what passed for government at the time traded fire over their heads, sometimes as a game with the captive humans as their target practice. They were provided food in the form of a tiny sack of rice, perhaps a few pounds’ worth, per family once in a while, and a family unit was considered any size from three to ten people at the whims of the distributors.
To make the rice stretch, they cooked rice porridge. Not like I cooked tonight, not like my parents cooked when they sometimes told this story, a nice thick fat grained rice porridge. It started the same way, with cooked rice, thinned it out with water, and cooked down further so that the rice would puff up and “grow” as the colloquialism goes.
But then they would thin it out even further than that, and the added water would take on the taste of the rice. The porridge would become a gruel after enough cooking, a small bowl of rice would stretch to a pot, and feed a family with the rice portion going to those who had to truly eat something and the watery portions going to those who didn’t truly need as much.
It’s been a while since I cooked a porridge but I always remember that story.
It was just a memory for them, but I can’t take food for granted and my parents never chided about starving children anywhere. I just think about all those months they waited and did without to survive until they regained right of safe passage.
Hainanese Chicken Recipe
Ingredients
Whole chicken
kosher salt to clean the chicken
1 teaspoon kosher salt for the rice
4” section of fresh ginger, in 1/4” slices
1” section of ginger, finely minced
2 stalks green onions, cut into 1″ sections (both the green and white parts)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoon chicken fat or 2 tbsp vegetable oil
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 cups long-grain uncooked rice
2 cups chicken broth, reserved from cooking chicken
1/4 cup dark soy sauce
Few sprigs cilantro
1 cucumber, thinly sliced or cut into bite-sized chunks
Chili sauce
1 tablespoon lime juice
2 tablespoon reserved chicken poaching broth
2 teaspoon sugar
4 tablespoon sriracha chili sauce
4 cloves garlic
1” ginger
a generous pinch of salt, to taste
Directions
Prep the ginger and garlic: peel 5 inches of ginger. Take 4 inches and slice in 1/4″ slices. Mince remaining inch of ginger. Mince ginger. Slice green onions in 1″ pieces.
Rinse rice and set aside to soak.
Prep the chicken: Clean the chicken with a small handful of kosher salt. Rub the chicken all over, getting rid of any loose skin and dirt. Rinse chicken well, inside and outside. Season generously with salt inside and outside. Stuff the chicken with the ginger slices and the green onion.
Cooking the Chicken
Place the chicken in a large stockpot and cover chicken w/1 inch of water. If the chicken is smaller than the width of the pot, fill with less water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then turn down to simmer.
Cook for about 30 minutes or less if you’re using a smaller chicken.
To check chicken: See if the juices run clear or check temperature (170 F) when the time is up.
Prep ice bath for the chicken.
When the chicken is cooked, turn off the heat. Transfer the chicken into a bath of ice water to stop the chicken’s cooking and throw out ginger and green onion.
Reserve the broth for your rice, your sauce, and the accompanying soup. There should be at least six or seven cups of broth reserved for soup.
Cooking the Rice
Drain the rice. Heat 2 tablespoons of cooking oil over medium-high heat. Add the ginger and the garlic and add in your drained rice and stir to coat, cook for 2 minutes. Add the sesame oil, mix well.
Stovetop: Add 2 cups of the reserved chicken broth, add salt and bring to a boil. Immediately turn the heat down to low, cover the pot and cook for ~ 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit, covered, for 5-10 minutes.
Rice cooker: Combine fried rice, ginger and garlic with 2.5 cups of chicken broth and salt in rice cooker. Follow rice cooker instructions.
Chili Sauce
Blend all chili sauce ingredients in a blender until smooth and bright red.
Serving
Remove from the ice bath and rub the outside of the chicken with the sesame oil. Carve the chicken and slice tomatoes and cucumbers for serving. Heat up the broth and season with salt to taste.
Serve the chicken rice with chili sauce, soy sauce, tomato and cucumber slices, and a bowl of hot broth garnished with scallions.
June 27, 2012
This is the tax season that may never end.
It was probably between lines 35 and 37, estimating our 2011 taxes. I was writing in another set of numbers. And before the reason fully settled in, I felt the full force of idiocy wave through my system.
My first mistake on my taxes and a whole filing year had passed.
I’d forgotten to claim my brother as a dependent for tax year 2010.
I could blame it on any number of things: Sheer carelessness, rushing through the taxes, not double checking my work, filing in a new home, or just plain being so mad at him he was financially dead to me.
Fact remained, I was an idiot.
And I had to meet Mssrs. 540x and 1040x.
For the record: If you’re not a neurotic fool, *ahem* you will read the instructions first like a normal human and find that it’s not actually all the difficult to fill out a correction. Twice. Once for state and once for federal. Because let’s face it, when you screw up claiming a dependent, you will have screwed it up on both.
In total, if I hadn’t gone back and spent too much time doing it wrong the first pass for three hours fussing over unnecessarily recreating the previous tax form and then taking a second, sane, pass at 30 minutes per form getting it right, I would have forever lost more than $3000.
The I.R.S. has already paid me back with a gentle nudge of a correction because I made a math error but they didn’t hold that against me and cut a check anyway.
The state of California still hasn’t paid ten weeks later, giving me a financial noogie, to rub it in that much more.
Bonus Round
To extend the pain cycle, I couldn’t even finish up our 2011 taxes because: We. Are. Still. Waiting. On. A. Schedule. K.
Hello, Filing for an Extension. For the first time in thirteen years of employed life.
No, I’m not bitter that I’m still not done with filing taxes in July, when I’ve always been done with taxes/FAFSA by February 2nd, why do you ask?
I’ve booked time in August to file the dratted thing. [Long dramatic sigh.]
Welcome to married life! Whereupon you hitch your star to the other guy and you apparently can’t do everything on your own time anymore. Apparently. *chagrined grin* No, obviously I’m not perfect. I just have my thing about getting taxes done by a certain time and we are oh-so-very-late.
May 28, 2012
This year, two of my baby relatives are heading off to medical school and I couldn’t be prouder.
Growing up in an equally poor household, their family stayed that way. They didn’t try to live above their means, live above their means or throw money away on big purchases. They had one parent stay home with the kids and tend to their needs physically and educationally: carting them around to school, a few limited activities, cooking, extra tutoring when they were younger or taking them to study groups and accelerated classes when they were older while the other parent worked.
Perhaps they got a wee bit spoiled in that they don’t cook or clean for themselves at all at home, but their mommy looooves to do those things for them. Instead they studied their tuchuses off and earned full scholarships to universities, and then took care of themselves after that. And now, medical school.
It finally feels like they’re becoming adults as much as I’ve been in denial about it even though they’ve been growing up right at my heels. It’s a cognitive dissonance that may never fade to realize my wee rellies aren’t so wee. I remember cradling them as infants, while just a child myself. I remember dandling babies off knees hardly far enough off the ground to fall and scrape it. The distance between us is half a decade and more, yet it seems like they represent the next generation, and perhaps even redeem mine own.
At times, I look at our socio-political landscape and I weep for our present. Others, I look at my cousins and I think, we may have something yet.
They might well indeed be the ones to mend up my broken heart over my sibling. They have potential still, they have futures to fulfill and prospects ahead of them. I can’t wait to see what life has in store for them and what they’ll do with it all.
They have “the promise of a generation.” (CJ Cregg, The West Wing)
May 21, 2012
Recent discussions about money, higher-earners and expectations, external and internal to the relevant family members, has conveniently coincided with the point in time where we start talking about trajectories for the future.
I was fascinated, and disturbed to see, value judgments still being passed on choices like whether dads should stay at home with the kids. I completely understand having a strong personal preference one way or the other, but I’m not a fan of declaring one way right or wrong when harm isn’t being done in the pursuit of building and rearing a family.
I wandered into a parenting forum that disgusted and outraged me on the subject. One woman was stomping all over the thread (population: single dads/stay at home dads/dads being the primary caretakers for other reasons) telling all the posters that they were second class citizens, the second but worst choice, that they were harming their children by choosing to be home with them instead of leaving them with the women in their lives, because “women are naturally better at caring for children”. Her claim was that at childbirth, women are gifted with the skills and a level of cognition that men can never achieve, so men are bumbling incompetents apt to do more harm than good interfering with the women’s right to raise the children.
In this day and age, that was difficult to see.
When people are constantly decrying the deadbeat dad, the detached dad, the long-gone dad, how on earth does someone have the gall to decry those men who are choosing their children over their career or choosing to make their career work with their children as the first priority? And what about those situations where the mothers/females are not in the children’s lives because they simply cannot be or choose not to be?
I can tell you this much: giving birth to a child means you are capable of giving birth. I have never in my anecdotal experience of seeing dozens of cousins, first, second and third degree, and coworkers, have children, seen it confer any level of parenting expertise that outmatched anyone else’s if that person didn’t have a brain to begin with and resources to coach them. I say this from having learnt how to care for three children alone, a toddler and two infants, while their idiot mother swanned off for several hours to hang out. Because she figured a seven year old was appropriate childcare for her 3 kids under the age of three. And from watching more than one coworker smoke and drink her way through pregnancy and then wonder why her kid was on a respirator at birth.
So what makes the “choice” more or less “ok”? If it’s not a choice and one has to be forced into the situation due to unemployment, disability, or other circumstances beyond one’s control?
That was the situation my relatives found themselves in: the husband was becoming obsolete in his field due to rapid technology changes and the cost of staying up to date was beyond their means. With the kids, it made sense for the dad to stay home with them. Yes, they were poor but they weren’t latchkey kids. And for all I know, that could have been the choice that saved our family from eventual meltdown.
Good friends of ours consciously made that choice. Dad could have kept a horrible commute to make more money but his wife made good enough money for their household and it was better for their peace of mind to always have Dad with the young ones rather than babysitting with family (which meant no rules!) when mom wasn’t home so that’s what they did.
Let this pessimist declare that judgment system flawed.
I’d much rather try to make as conscious a choice as possible and plan ahead. I know what it’s like to be raised with not much in the till or on the table, and I saw how much my parents struggled with not having anything at the end of their lives. In the middle here, I’d like to attempt some informed choices that include all possibilities.
I like to think I’d choose to be a mother who stays in the workplace because I don’t think I’d be stellar at caretaking while I know I’m awesome at professional work. I know this because I’ve spent over 20 years caring for family and children, related or not. I love them dearly but it’s exhausting and I simply didn’t have the instinctive biological yearning that my mother did to want to continue to care for children. I’m not bad at it, in fact, I am a great sitter in a pinch, but I’m no Child Whisperer. In contrast, love or hate my job at the time, I’ve always been good at it. And even if I’m in pain, I can do my job. And when it’s really bad, I can work from home or take a sick day. You cannot take a sick day from your kid!
PiC, on the other hand, may not have 20+ years under his belt but he is goooood with kids. They love him. They love uncle to distraction. At any age, at any time of day or night, Uncle is awesome. And he has so much more energy than I do. And to him, a job is a job is a job. It’s there to make a living, he’d rather be (fill in the blank). He understands how to live life – which is what grounds me when I’m willing to be grounded away from work.
He’s never loved his work to the degree that I do. My theory is that he would be way better at home with kids than I would. I have no real idea if he’d survive nap times and setting structure but he’s so good at ignoring a clingy Doggle that I’m certain he’d set boundaries after a while. Men parent differently and I know he’d make it work.
Financially, it could be a little tricky. Frankly, at the moment, he has far superior benefits. Mine are mediocre. If we had a family, I’d want his coverage. I make more now but I need to make way more if we were to lose his salary. In part, because we’re still covering my dad. But things could definitely change. I could find a better gig with better benefits, or at least different benefits, and then it could work.
At the end of all this, this is only the Right Now.
My health hasn’t improved appreciably over the last ten years and has in some ways, declined. This is a reminder that we cannot take our health and capabilities for granted.
There are so many unknowns:
What’s my actual health and earning life span? (No idea.)
What if he takes a break and has to go back to work? How does that work? (we could sort of plan for that)
What if I have to be the one to take a break?
How does that affect earnings and savings?
And what about cultivating alternative income?
And honestly, we could just change our minds and want something totally different from what we thought we wanted. I not only want, I need and expect that to be ok. That’s why any of this: choice.
April 16, 2012
We’d recently taken a much needed break to spend a few days with friends and a week without in Hawaii for our delayed honeymoon. I didn’t realize how very much we needed it but we were frazzled and dipped in less than happy sauce by the time we got on the plane.
I’d been stressing over financing the trip with points or miles for months, but honestly when it came right down to it, the effort of what used to be easy-breezy personal finance was just a burden on my overtaxed attention meter. I just couldn’t do it so we booked the flights, lucking into a sale, and put it on our card that we’ve been concentrating on building points for. It was expensive.
Transportation alone cost:
$550 for rental cars
$2300 for airfare
= Total, $2850
I thought we’d see some real savings not going to Australia…. whoo, boy. Not so much. And the food, oh my gosh the food. It was one, fannntastic. But two? Oh wow. I actually stopped keeping mental tabs on the spending because I needed to be able to enjoy the trip. After all, spending quality time together and stuffing our faces were the primary reasons we went! Boy, did we. Stuff our faces, I mean.
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| The requisite umbrella drinks on our first night in town! |
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| The most amazing bouillabaise I’ve ever seen – or eaten. That bread was a foot long, btw. That’s a lobster tail you see there. Next to the largest prawn I’ve ever consumed. Next to the best crab legs. Ever. |
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| Plate Lunches! A loco moco for her. Fried fish, chicken and pork with fries for him. |
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| Luau appetizers. Pineapple, poi chips, sashimi. |
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| Lunch at Leoda’s. Leave your heart (and most of your cash). Absolutely delicious. Definitely pricey but oh, so good. |
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| No vacation would be complete if I didn’t find a stray to pet! |
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| The famous Black Sand Beach – the sands were amazing. There is a big layer of black rocks; then really grainy sand. |
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| Yet another gorgeous beach on the road to Hana |
Sadly, I spent most of the trip down with a virus, apparently I’d been pre-infected or something so we were forced to keep our activities to a minimum. Bummer. It was still beautiful and the food was amazing but I’d really like to call a Calvin-and-Hobbesian do-over!
An interesting thing about Maui, I noticed, was the assortment of resorts and timeshares populating the coast. We meandered through a few of the semi-local areas on our own looking for more hole in the wall, less-touristy places to eat but pretty much everything catered to tourists if you were a reasonable distance from the coast. A local real estate office posted the listings for the timeshares currently available in its windows and of course I had to run over and look. It was incredible how much they were going for.
The place we stayed at simply wasn’t a luxury location or business, which was fine considering we only booked several months out so the booking agency couldn’t get us into anything nicer, but I couldn’t believe they’d sell at nearly the same pre-owned rates as the Westin or the Hyatt down the road. I guarantee you that the quality had to be much better at the places down the way. Our concierge had the gall to tell us our trip “wasn’t a honeymoon if the wedding was 5 months ago.” There’s some service for you. While I’m not overly precious about the trip myself, that was downright rude. If a guest was sensitive about it which frankly, given the fact that had we tried to honeymoon after our wedding and cancelled because of my mom’s death, I would have been … well, lucky for him, I was in vacation mode and my claws had been left at home. I’m just shaking my head over his need to go out of his way to be rude rather than just shrug and move on.
PiC and I had a fun debate over the cost of a timeshare and real estate in Maui. A driving tour guide told us that one piece of land (2 acres) plus a house was going for what seemed like a reasonable amount compared to the Bay Area: $400,000. You simply can’t get that kind of property here and I’ll admit to a moment of sheer insanity – what if we got a second home in Hawaii!?
……
Yes, ok. I had vacation brain. Right, we don’t even have a first house.
Plus, the cost of eating there had nearly given me a heart attack. I abandoned PiC in one grocery store because I’d nearly frozen to death while he ooohed and aaahhhed over the prices like we were in a zoo admiring otters do backflips. With cereal costing anywhere between $7-9/box, milk running $8/gallon, fruit $2/piece and up, it was hard to blame him but I didn’t go to Hawaii to become a Popsicle in their refrigerated section.
Anyway, housing – COLA was incredible. And while property tax was purportedly very low according to a couple of friends, cost of living for everything else remained skyhigh. Gas prices are actually higher than in the Bay Area by 10%. So no, a second home is everything firmly on the side of insane. It was funny to dream for a minute though. I just got suckered in by the idea.
Our two budget-busters were the luau and the really nice dinner in Paia. Luaus are, no kidding, pricey as all get out. We definitely ate way too much. And our friends recommended a fantastic seafood restaurant so I saved all my seafoody wishes for that restaurant and ate until I could hold no more. It’s embarrassing how much that food cost, actually, I couldn’t believe that it could run so much. But, as our dear friend who sent us to this timeshare texted us, “you only have a first honeymoon once!”
Yes, I burst out laughing. No, I didn’t text her back: “first?” That text is my justification for a do-over. 😉
It was a lovely trip. I had to let my hair down and in fact, let it wave free because I forgot my hairbrush. PiC had no qualms about being seen with me in public like that. He’s always been good about embracing messy-mussy-me. We had fun. It was a little bittersweet, remembering why we are still doing it out of order and still haven’t celebrated with family and friends. But it was good, reconnecting, rediscovering the world, and doing really really stupid things together like eating so much pork at a luau that neither of you can walk without pain. We deserved each other that night, and probably always.
April 3, 2012
Once upon a time, I dreamed big for the future. Out of those dreams, I formulated a life plan wherein I’d be taking a professional health degree of some kind and a PhD, entering a white collar profession, and buying a home for myself and my parents (separate homes, mind) before the age of 30. After 30 was a little hazy, but I figured plotting the next 23 years was good enough. Also, two degrees and affording two homes was a tough enough nut to crack – I wasn’t ready to plot any more years.
This was before I knew the words “net worth” because, you know, seven years old, but you had better believe that the balance sheets did not include debt. I’d already been writing out the checks for the bills for my parents and knew how I wanted to set up my own budget when the time came.
You may notice, as my mother had, that I had made no provisions in those plans, for marriage or kids. As far as I was concerned, it might happen, it might not, I wasn’t planning on it or depending on it and figured it wasn’t terribly relevant to the trajectory of my career and money. That was a pretty unsophisticated understanding of how life and marriage works.
Clearly, I was bound and determined to have my own mind and at the time, that also meant keeping my own finances, separate and free. As the years passed, I saw too many bad choices made by one or another couple where there was a divide in the spender/saver continuum, even in my own family, or business decisions gone awry, especially in my own family, and I just couldn’t fathom living in that life.
“If you live in a community property state, not combining finances is just lying to yourself about legalities.” @practicalwed
So once upon a time, I might have disagreed with Meg. Despite my primary marriage example being the relatively healthy and supportive partnership my parents shared in which they had combined finances, I was still certain that I could keep separate finances in any prospective marriage and cope just fine.
Except I’d never coped with two separate systems for myself and my parents so I had no blueprint for a working system. I’d assumed it was only a lack of income on their part and need to control on my part that that didn’t work.
After several months of juggling our separate systems, the time has come to wish good bye to that once-loved independent money philosophy: PiC and I need to combine our finances. Between my OCD control tendencies and his laissez-faire attitude to saving versus spending, I now doubt that we’d get to our final destination in one piece. And we live in a community property state so, frankly, we are combined in the eyes of the law, whether we have combined or not. Entangled, like it or not. (Romantic, hm?)
It’s been as stressful being hands-off while we paid bills separately and waited for incomes to reach stasis as it was maintaining two separate sets of accounts for myself and my parents more than ten years ago.
We just don’t function very well managing our “own” money when we have such different views of it. Part of it is the actual management and lack of transparency. The system isn’t set up well at the moment between our paychecks and direct deposits.
And philosophically, he still viewed his money as his money and spent freely, resenting that an uneven amount of expenses were coming out of his pocket, while I viewed all the money as our money and saved to offset his spending, and resented his depletion of our budget.
It turns out that we need to literally be on the same page to think from the same page. Never thought that’d be the case but there it is.
Starting at the beginning, I evaluated all our expenses and income and set up the target amounts that we’d want in specific pots for our savings and spendings goals. Now, we just have to figure out which banks and which accounts to keep and which to cut out, then actually do it.
Married Life Posts:
Married Life: Benefits
Married Life: Mortgage Prepayment for Refinancing
Married Life: Blending spending styles and learning the art of compromise
