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
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August 23, 2018
RIP Aretha Franklin.
Dinosaur Fiction! “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat” by Brooke Bolander
This thread is amazing, I wish I could have volunteered for that snack. I mean, study. Also, fat shaming is bad.
Can you break from these wedding traditions? Is your family / friend set ready? Ours isn’t but I hope that we can wean ourselves away.
Done by Forty on Food Deserts. I never knew about those non competes!
I most certainly dream about luxury travel but we still haven’t done it. The most luxurious thing we’ve done is enjoyed a lounge as part of our travel card benefits. The travel itself remains the main attraction.
I want to jump up and down for NK Jemisin who won a third Hugo in a row. Historic! Her Broken Sky trilogy is beyond amazing. (This link is NOT broken, WordPress is just being a wart and pretending that it is, and I can’t fix it. ARGH!)
Cloud on uncertainty and grace. I’m trying to practice this now that we’re hitting some troughs in our once-balanced lives. We’ve had an extraordinarily good run in job stability and it’s ended but I remind myself that we went through a trough before this good peak and that if we are lucky and work at it, we will end this trough with another peak. I can’t embrace the good without acknowledging and understanding that bad comes with it. Or put it another way, we spent three years with professional ease which allowed us to deal with a most difficult phase of parenting and now that THAT is arguably less harrowing, the professional side of our lives needs more attention. That’s fair.
I’m glad to see Kelly Marie Tran again. The online harassment of her as a woman and POC with a leading role in Star Wars was unconscionable. Also, I adored her character in Star Wars.
First Burn
I missed this Hamildrop in April but it is SENSATIONAL. Just utterly beautiful down to the bone.
https://youtu.be/r2ys-AimNbE
August 22, 2018
One of my long-standing bastions of money irrationality has finally fallen! It’s been a long time coming and I’m very proud of making the progress, finding the emotional maturity and steadiness, needed to take it down.
This is the change in my money management that I alluded to a while ago.
I’m incredibly risk averse and conservative in my money management. This trait (habit?) goes waaaay back.
I was once a workaholic, wrapped up in building my career and scrutinizing every single move and communique like it might have hidden gold or a secret message for success because every penny mattered. Because I had to support a family even before crossing the threshold to adulthood, at age 17, any money that I earned went to paying down debt and building up a basic savings account instead of investing in a Roth IRA. I had to keep cash on hand at all times because there was always something going wrong: someone got sick, my trainwreck sibling had run up another utility bill, an endless stream of flat tires, dental emergency, or more dental issues.
Obviously, after many long, tough years of working and saving, I made it through that period. But also just as obviously, I bear the scars which translate to being even more risk averse. At this point in time, I’m highly concerned about the possibility of a recession in the next few years, as well as highly concerned about our job security. There’s always been a question mark over my job, but recently one has been hung over PiC’s job, and that brought all of my fears back to the fore.
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August 20, 2018
My former property manager was a disaster. For the purposes of this post and my crankiness, she’s being renamed from Crappy Old Property Manager to Fiasco. She ran hot and cold: sometimes taking care of business and communicating, sometimes taking days and weeks of emails to get something done.
The rent was usually paid on time, but every so often, we’d run afoul of the HOA rules because the tenants weren’t in compliance now and again. The issues were things I THOUGHT were simple, and wondered why they couldn’t manage to comply but I didn’t take direct action. I’m a bit of novice at this and wasn’t sure of the right course of action.
Normally I wouldn’t do business with someone this inconsistent, I was enjoying being hands off too much in these first years with JuggerBaby and all the house stuff. But no more. It turns out that there was so much wrong under the surface, I’m so glad that I got fed up before the mess got much worse.
There’s an outstanding balance that the tenants haven’t been paying from the HOA morass two years ago and Fiasco claimed the tenants were aware of it every month but wouldn’t pay down more than a fraction of it. Fiasco dismissed it as something that’ll just come out of the security deposit but as I reassess the value of each person I’m paying money to work for me, that’s just not going to cut the mustard. We don’t know what, if anything, we’ll need the security deposit to pay for at the end of these tenants’ stay, but if it’s significant, I don’t want to have wasted it on this bill. (more…)
August 16, 2018
Small win: The sun came out long enough for me to wash out the garbage bins this week. First time in months! Of course I have mud all over my shoes now but the bins don’t stink.
What were your small wins this week?
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An incredibly valuable thread on how to address domestic abuse in the workplace. I’m thinking of ways this advice can become policy in our workplaces.
Do you Freecycle?
This saving for retirement in retirement piece actually helped me narrow down my own choices for the minor freelance income that I’ve earned this year.
A painful read about slave trading in Nigeria.
Schedule your fun or no?
Weekends with small children can be so exhausting.
This thread on our brains and how it copes with our eyes and our blind spots is slightly disturbing.
A Hot, Wet Tragedy of the Commons
I do my best to give candid feedback for my teams. Whether or not it makes me comfortable, the most important thing is that they are learning from mistakes and having the chance to improve their performance.
August 15, 2018
Looking Backward
Now that this particular transition is in the rearview mirror, I can breathe easy and be ever so grateful that we never had any trouble with reflux or transitioning JB from bottles to sippy cups to regular cups. (Ze still wanted zir sippy as recently as two months ago but just for fun, because rummaging through the cabinets gives zir nostalgia like it gives me, and has wholeheartedly embraced the late-introduced camelbak.)
A cousin is struggling with their kid’s transition away from bottles. They’re going on three and still refuses milk in anything but bottles and that reminded me that at least on that point, we were incredibly lucky. When I gave JB zir first couple of sippies just to play with around a year, ze chewed up the spout enthusiastically, then THERE IS WATER IN HERE. WHOA!
At around 14 months, I decided that traveling with bottles again sounded awful, so we were ditching the bottles. We started giving only water in bottles, and milk in sippies, then I started giving only water in sippies before naps because we were supposed to avoid teeth rotting from having milk before sleeping. Picky though ze was about many other things, this was a non issue. Within a week, the bottles were phased out entirely and the next time I heard a peep about bottles was when ze discovered the bottles stashed in the closet a year later and was Extremely Curious about what they were and why they were stashed. Thank goodness we had that bit easy.
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August 13, 2018
Within a 6 mile radius, we have 6 food sources. There’s something good at ALL OF THEM. Every single one has things that the other stores don’t and it’s led to some real inefficiencies. Three stores in a week is too much.
Costco
Things we buy and use in bulk: sliced cheese, bread, yogurt, my beloved white corn tortillas, green beans for 50 cents a can for the dogs,
Trader Joe’s
Can’t get anywhere else: sardines and glucosamine for Seamus, $3/lb ground turkey, $4 cauliflower pizza crust
Asian market
Can’t get anywhere else: very cheap specialty produce (snow peas, snap peas, peeled garlic), dried squid treats, my favorite rice crackers.
Sprouts
Can’t get anywhere else: my probiotics, regular sales on frozen shrimp, bulk staples (flour, sugar, nuts, some grains)
Safeway
Can’t get anywhere else: standard staples like generic soda flavors (used for cooking), egg noodles (which I guess doesn’t matter for me anymore since I can’t have them)
Local produce shop
Can’t get anywhere else: The cheapest and freshest produce. (more…)
August 9, 2018
Small win: I saved $50 on our dogsitting bill.
What were your small wins this week?
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Is Future You good at guiding Present You?
The USPS used to be incredibly innovative.
S at the $76K Project is doing a semi-regular series on Wins and you know I’m all about celebrating these things.
I have a long way to go in teaching JB critical thinking.
Sense’s experience with LASIK.
How to help grieving people – really useful comments and suggestions for helping recently or not so recently bereaved
How do you feel about money right now?
I wish the Paralyzed Veterans of America group well with this lawsuit. We should all have basic access to bathrooms.
Leigh and life most likely post-STEM. This came out when I was at SDCC and I didn’t have time to do it justice earlier.
Three research-based ways to maximize the fun of leisure activities: “The key to enjoying your leisure activities is to live in the moment as much as possible. Be spontaneous and don’t live by the calendar”
They make a good point about not setting an end time but still, I think we do better when we have boundaries like start and stop times, and only one fun activity scheduled per day off. It lets us fully enjoy the thing we’re doing and still get enough rest so we’re not paying the price later. How do you schedule fun?
The Queer Art of Failing Better: “In 2018, Queer Eye is no longer necessarily “For The Straight Guy,” as it was in the aughts, but being a straight mainstream white guy now seems to come with an elevated risk of panic in the face of basic life-skills like learning to clean your room and deal with your childhood traumas. Up till now, this was the demographic that was always told that if they just hung on long enough, someone else would eventually do it for them. Probably a woman.”
“The work that the Fab Five are doing for the luckless, loveless men of Georgia is girlfriend work. It is emotional labor, domestic labor, the work that anyone who has ever dated a straight man will recognize.”