I neeeeeever wanted to have an answer to this question: When’s the last time you ran into your ex? How was it? Where were you? I had a firm rule developed some time in college: never look back, never talk to exes again. This was after my first serious boyfriend, I think, and was meant to include casually dated people because I didn’t really casually date. Welp, that changed last year. At a holiday outing, a person who looked vaguely familiar and his family joined our group. I didn’t pay much mind because logically, if I only vaguely recognized him, I probably didn’t want to actually recognize him. I was sticking to it. Then at the end of the evening he identified himself to me in one of the weirdest possible imaginable ways, thus shattering my rule and my plausible deniability. HUMPH. I had some ungenerous thoughts about him. That was just one of the few people I casually dated back in the day. I never ever want to run into an actual ex. Ever.
I feel like the first dog
Note: I don’t agree most anti-socialist judgements – they ignore all the realities of life like illness, disability, structural issues like racism and sexism. But the dogs are hilarious.
Angela’s Friday Five made me want to do better. As it often does. But in a good way!
Aitza’s cheap eats strategies for Europe. Ever since car seats became a thing in our lives, I’ve not felt any urge to travel internationally to non-Asian countries with JB (a number of Asian countries don’t require carseats and apparently it’s safe…) but the Done by Fortys are doing it!
This is why Alexa and Siri are banned from my home. It’s basically the equivalent of consenting to bug my own home for the benefit of tech companies. NOPE.
“In the company of their aunts, nephews and nieces know that they are privileged persons. The bonds of duty are somehow relaxed: they have no obligations but to be happy.” I relate to so many of those quotes. I have always maintained that loving aunties and uncles are a key to successful parenting. On the hard days, they can help out a bit or help us remember what is good about the kid. On the good days, it’s wonderful to share the love of the small human. Of course, JB adores the ones we have kept in zir life. And it’s so important to me as a person and as a parent to know that JB is surrounded by family we’ve chosen to fill in that hole left by the family we cannot have.
I thought Meg had published this under her byline but I guess I missed that Anonymous byline! I Make Twice As Much As My Husband. I absolutely aspire to make twice as much, nay, thrice as much, as my husband makes (based on his salary plus the value of his fringe benefits) right now.
If I’m doing this right, the Capacity Factor of our guest bedroom ranges from 12-18% depending on the year. On average, we might host 50 nights a year. The over/under depends on more random visitors, we host at minimum 36 nights a year. The Price Ratio is 6%.
All I read was the headline: “Would You Sell Everything to Travel the World?” I laughed. No. Never. Not if I had a choice about it, anyway. Zero knocks on people for whom that isn’t a laughable notion of course, I used to think a nomadic life sounded great too. I loved the idea of being a city girl, I loved the notion of being location independent. But at this point in my life, I know who I am and what makes me happiest. Even just traveling for up to 2 weeks reminds me who I am. After ten days away, I am awash with fatigue and a burning desire to be left alone. I am a homebody. I am the happiest in my hobbit hole and only venturing out when I feel like it and running back home to nest and read books and eat and read some more. I have no desire to constantly be on the move or even just without a home base. Who are you?
We talk a lot about what constitutes the middle class in the PF world. I consider us upper middle class but reading this WSJ article, it strikes me again (without judgement) that we have such different ideas of what the buying power of an UMC/MC income is. For example:
The two-child couple earned just over $100,000 until 2017. They had a roughly $106,000 mortgage, about $97,000 in student-loan debt and $24,000 in car loans.
Then Ms. Young, 33, moved from a full-time to a part-time faculty position at a university because of its budget cuts. With income reduced to around $70,000, they still felt confident enough in their earning power to borrow $48,000 to finance two cars in 2017.
We have a mortgage that’s twice our combined annual incomes and don’t have any other debt so we have a similar debt ratio to the couple in the article. But for us, at this ratio, I don’t consider ourselves in a position to be taking on additional debt. We will need to replace my car and I have to think quite carefully about what we can “afford” and how we’ll pay for it. We both blanch at the $30k price tags of any newer cars despite our very solid savings program because those savings are specifically for future retirement. I need to start setting aside savings that are meant for spending on a car but we simply can’t get behind the idea of taking on an auto loan again if it doesn’t make very clear financial sense.
That gap between what we think an UMC income, or even an MC income, should buy remains fairly large. Even I wonder why we “can’t afford” (cannot easily pay for, without financial consequences) to just buy a new car when we make and save as much as we do. The reality is still that becausewe have to save as much as we do, we can’t spend freely. It’s one or the other.
Tami has hit a particularly rough patch and it’s going income for some time. This is one of my personal nightmares – hitting such serious health issues I can’t work to pay our bills but I’ve been incredibly lucky so far. If you can help, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.
Over the years I’ve wondered why we didn’t move more towards a year round school, this article discusses the complications thereof: “It is easy to misconceive summer vacation as a simple product of agrarian needs rather than this more complicated story of demands for standardization, teacher professionalization, budget problems, lax attendance and fears of overburdening students. And this historical inaccuracy matters. The misperception leaves today’s reformers fighting the wrong battle, while conceding that the school calendar is something that deserves deference as if it was carefully constructed with best practices in mind.”
I love hearing how separate finances work for people. We started out separate and I assumed I’d want to keep it that way (pride, independence, etc) but our money set-up evolved as we matured as a couple because part of that process was me admitting unabashedly that I’m a control freak and so separate finances made me unhappy. PiC wasn’t bothered either way but he does appreciate the fact that I’ll go great lengths to grow our money and it just requires communication on his part to keep things working well. I relish my role as the CFO and controller of all monies and think it’s funny I ever deluded myself into thinking I wouldn’t want to be. It makes a huge difference that we earn almost similar salaries, though. It’s tough when there are great disparities in incomes and also disparities in what each part of the couple wants to spend.
We also agree that if we ever get divorced, we split the money down the middle, period. Doesn’t matter what we brought into the marriage or who did what with how much during the marriage. We will split equally and prioritize our child’s needs if ze is still a minor. Discussing things like this when we still love and respect each other will, I hope, help us behave as a mature adults should we ever have to split.
Ginsburg’s iconic status with women, in particular, and her leadership of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court mean any health news involving the tiny, 86-year-old justice can cause something of a panic in certain quarters.
Ginsburg is not oblivious to health concerns, but she waves away worries about her future.
“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months,” she recalled. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I,” she added with a smile, “am very much alive.”
Casting of Shang Chi
I really like Simu in Kim’s Convenience and look forward to him as Shang Chi. I’m much less enthused about Awkwafina.
Oops. Little known tidbit: I did multi-lingual wedding invitations for our ‘do and misspelled a couple words.
Parenting strategy: I wonder if JB likes cars enough for this analogy to work or if we can come up with a similar one. I actually have been doing something a little different – when I discipline, I also ask JB what ze could have done differently and after months of that, when I least expected it, ze offered up the “what I should have done was…”
US birth rates are at lowest levels in 32 years. I had to look up why not exactly replacing a generation matters when we’re also concerned about too many people and not enough resources on a planet that’s been strained by human use. It’s a weird dichotomy. I have friends with 3-5 kids and also a lot of friends without any or who stopped at 1, across spectrum of regions, ages, and races. I assumed it would average out to an equal replacement rate.
Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. I had no data on it but this is kind of line for what I was expecting for myself: “But the odds are he won’t be able to. The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.
According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that.”
