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
I wasn’t there so I’m light on details but we’ll be digging into our savings to pay off a $1000 charge on the AmEx because of Sera. She got into a tussle over Father’s Day weekend and because she outweighs the other dog by 40 pounds, the other dog got the worst of it.
When PiC called to tell me that she’d wrangled with another dog, I knew just from his breathing in the three seconds before he actually said anything that something had gone terribly wrong. I hate phone calls. They’re never good news.
Sera was responding to aggression and thought she was fighting in self defense. The other dog definitely thought she was responding to Sera’s aggression and fighting in self defense.
Sera carries more than just the physical scars of healed bite marks on the top of her head that stay bare of fur, the still open wound in her ear that can’t heal because of where it is. When a dog makes aggressive noises at her, even if only warning her off, she reacts with fear because she’s learned that means she’s about to be attacked. She learned this from her family, the one that gave her up too late for her to trust other dogs easily, only after she’d been attacked several times by the family dog.
It could be a lot worse.
Sera’s wounds were generally superficial. I cleaned them and wrapped them up in ten minutes before we headed over to the clinic. The other dog’s wounds were manageable but the bites were still deep enough that they required surgery to be sure that they wouldn’t get infected. We sat with the owner at the emergency clinic until after the exam to make sure that she knew we were going to take care of it. It might not have been Sera’s fault but it was still our responsibility when she hurt the other dog.
Small win: I found a new next size up bathing suit for JB for next to nothing!
What were your small wins this week?
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If the separation of parents and children also breaks your heart, and you can donate to one of these causes linked in his tweet to help the kids, show Dr. Linus your receipt – he’ll match up to $10k, however long it takes. UPDATE June 21 10:53 am PST, he’s down to the last $150. Good job, y’all!
At least one very popular PF blogger is an asshat who think that it’s ok that migrant children are being separated from their families because they still have food and shelter because it’s far more concerning that children in Syria are living in dire circumstances. A) Read up on the lifelong consequences of familial separations, well known since after Operation Pied Piper in WWII. B) Both things are terrible and we should donate to help both horrible situations. C) Our government is materially contributing to the crappy situation in Syria just like it’s materially contributing to the separation and internment of babies and children. This all needs to stop. D) I don’t know about that blogger but I do have the capacity to care about more than one group of people and they don’t even have to look like or be like me to deserve it.
This is one of my nightmares: losing one of us when our child is young. We do have our life insurance and our wills, our trust, and I’m still working on pulling all the pertinent information into one handy Life and Death folder.
I’ve got a backburner full of unanswered questions, none of them big enough for a post, and all of them bothering me enough that I want to dump them out of my brain.
It always helps me to write through my puzzlement, and I’m hoping that putting them out here will help me make decisions on at least a few of them!
Keep or return the large WaterPik set that PiC bought on sale to Costco?
I haven’t had time to do more research on what set makes the most sense for our situation but I wanted something that would be relatively portable because we have limited counter space and travel regularly.
Conclusion: I think we should return this for now.
Buy dog health insurance or self insure?
The Nationwide quote was $1100 a year for full coverage which gives 90% back on vet bills, and you can use any vet:
*The relevant wellness stuff that I expect to pay for every year would be far less in any given year than the premiums except for the dental cleaning. Any year she got a dental, the cost would likely be at least $1000:
Our mortgage, recast twice though it has been, is still an astronomical 4 figure number that I’m quietly desperate to reduce as fast as possible. To that end, though we don’t have much spare every month, our payments have been rounded up to the nearest thousand to whittle away at that principal slowly. Drip drip drip!
Before I could bask in the rewards of taking a long term approach, I discovered a hole in our plans.
We started paying a multi-hundred dollar therapy bill monthly at the end of 2017 and I blithely assumed we could cash flow it. Yes, but…
This is where the drips worked against me. I lost track of when the extra therapy bills ate up our whole cash buffer in the checking account but we slowly dripped and dribbled that “extra” money out the door. It’s entirely gone now and we’re back to a paycheck to paycheck situation.
All our money first goes to their various prescheduled destinations (investing and savings), then we have exactly what we need to cover our bills as they come up. This is NOT ideal. As loathe as I am to have money sitting in checking accounts not earning any interest, the scenario where a missed paycheck would send me straight to pulling money out of our savings and that stinks. We do maintain a large cash savings for major bills like insurance and property tax but that isn’t intended to be tapped for any normal recurring monthly expenses.
Sadly this means I’ve got to make even more budget cuts. The “big” mortgage principal payments of $200 are now reduced to only $20 extra per month. Our cash buffer needs to be at least $3000 to be useful for more than a minute and that’s going to take quite a while to rebuild. In the meantime, I’m considering the impact this will have on our charitable giving.
Small win: We had an extra long stretch on the social calendar in addition to my tripled workload. It was touch and go whether I’d make it through without blowing my top. I made it!! What were your wins this week?
I’m thrilled for Stacking Pennies, one of my original early days money blogging friends. She is expecting!
The Fuck-over-ability Index: As a manager, I definitely don’t pry into my people’s lives or encourage them to overcommit financially so we can overwork them. That’s messed up. I expect them to do a great job because that’s the job while I do my best to compensate them fairly and treat them well. And regardless, I expect that attrition will happen because that’s how it works.
The quiz was reasonably accurate for us though. I scored a 22: You can push back on your boss if they’re being totally unreasonable without fear of immediately going into financial ruin if you lose your job.
Waffles on Wednesday talks privilege. I like it when people are willing to speak on this, and when we practice gratitude for our many advantages and blessings.
A trustworthy immigration lawyer I know vouches for this group of lawyers fundraising to litigate against Jeff Sessions. If you can support them, that would be a tangible way to fight the ongoing horribleness with immigration in the US.
Sandy dug into the fine print of the Tulsa Real Estate Fund and points out some very valid concerns. It would be awesome for this fund to succeed, but as a mentor and I lamented, not on the backs of our own people (respectively). We see investing schemes and money advice that are about exploiting the community rather than building it up and it’s highly concerning because there are a lot of people trying to make their financial situations a little better, and a lot of people out there to take advantage of the shared connections, to take advantage of them. I truly hope they make some minor changes to ensure that doesn’t play out here.
Anthony Bourdain’s passing saddened me, he was such a creative thinker and I admired his risk taking and unique perspectives. One of the reasons I liked Anthony Bourdain (as much as you can like someone you’ve never met) is because I admired his ability to deal with his own pain and anger without projecting it on others, and instead trying to portray the humanity of cultures that were not his own without trying to look superior or like he’s the first to discover them. There was no appropriation or disrespect, it was entirely the opposite, and that was refreshing.
E. Nesbit‘s The Book of Dragons
Maybe it was just my mood but I didn’t really like this one at all. It felt far too old timey and juvenile. Which makes sense, it’s a children’s book. But there are children’s books and then there are books that delight children and adults alike. This wasn’t the latter.
Terry Pratchett‘s Nation
I did really like this one – I hadn’t read it for ages because it wasn’t Discworld and I’ve been in the mood for great comedy primarily but I’m glad that I gave this one a go.
Pretax contributions come out of his paycheck first: taxes, retirement contributions, health, dental and vision coverage, pre-tax FSA, his disability and life insurance. His benefits are way better than my employer’s.
After that haircut, our paychecks hit the joint checking accounts. 30% of our total take-home pay is immediately transferred to our joint savings account for long term savings or investing, another 10% is sent to a savings account, held against the large bills coming up in the course of the year: life, car, home, and earthquake insurance, property taxes (A DOOZY), income taxes if we unexpectedly made more and deducted less over the year. That will need to increase to 15% in 2019.
The remaining 60% covers all living expenses: mortgage, utilities, daycare, credit cards (gas, groceries, discretionary spending, dog supplies and medications).
Small win: I found a new next size up bathing suit for JB for next to nothing!
I’ve got a backburner full of unanswered questions, none of them big enough for a post, and all of them bothering me enough that I want to dump them out of my brain.
Our mortgage, 
What I read
Thanks to being