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
Scalzi on coolness vs not coolness. This is exactly how I’ve been thinking of the cool / not cool designations in our friend groups! But it does leave me I’m confused where I go because I’m definitely not cool (people don’t expend energy coming to me, by and large), am very ok with that not-coolness, but also don’t put energy out to draw people in, either.
Not due to racism, obviously, but JB doesn’t have much of a relationship with my Dad right now. It wasn’t due to lack of effort on our part at first but I’ve stopped trying. Ze doesn’t seem to notice that my parent isn’t in zir life. Ze has noticed that ze hasn’t met my mom and knows that she’s dead but perhaps due to age, or because I’ve supplied multiple surrogates. I am maintaining a policy of not lying but am working on giving zir more neutral and graspable answers suitable for a 3 year old.
Ever since spending time with a pregnant Auntie Crystal, JB has been pretending that ze has a baby in zir belly. Ze also pretends that PiC and I do too. It’s a little weird but whatever, we play along. Ze also enjoys reassigning our genders, for some reason (YOU da mommy, and you a BOY. YOU da daddy, and you da GIRL). Not sure where that came from.
Oh and ze also has an invisible baby hamster that gets wrapped up in zir favorite blanket, or goes missing every so often. Invisible baby hamster gets handed to me at the end of the night to “put on Daddy’s belly to keep warm”.
Morning Glory no more
Alas, JB no longer wakes up like a bright lightbulb clicking on. Ze has morphed into me: groggy, grumpy, so not ready for morning to come.
I’ve had to harness all the good cheer that I can find so that I can pass it on to zir and get us all out the door at a reasonable hour. I keep thinking that we really need to outgrow this or else it’s going to make the transition to school really tough. That’s coming up much sooner than I’d like to think.
I forgot to mention some of these in April’s update so I’m taking credit this month!
Craiglist Sales. PiC had some luck offloading some of our spare parts. That brought in a small handful of cash: $40.
Legal settlement. I got an unexpectedly large check for a lawsuit for a brand of dog food that we’d bought for years. It turns out that not enough people claimed their share so my check was almost twice the amount originally projected! Score! $280.
Decluttr. I tried selling off some books and DVDs. Sadly, most of the DVDs we have aren’t desirable but oddly enough some old Meg Ryan movies were. And I sold PiC’s smashed to heck phone for a few bucks which was more than I thought we’d get: $10.
Freelancing. I picked up a little bit of freelance work. That brought in almost $400 between March and April. May was too busy with work to do much on this front but I did manage to squeeze in another $100 worth.
Do you have any pre-marriage and/or pre-kids regrets? Things you wished you’d done? I kind of wish we had traveled a little more, mostly because I now appreciate how many times simpler it was back then.
PiC and I aren’t zero-wasters but we make an effort to be as low waste as possible. Here are some of the things we’re doing now:
1. Reusable shopping bags and produce bags
I didn’t get on this bandwagon until plastic bags were banned here in Northern CA because we always reused our plastic bags for the garbage, but we had a good stash of reusable bags from Comic Con to use when that ban went into effect. We’ve also added mesh produce bags to our shopping trips to reduce the number of small veggie bags that we use, and may soon switch over to using free newspaper to line our tiny trash bins to reduce our use of plastic even more.
2. Recycle!
Everything that can be, is!
Food is kept separate from paper and plastic recycling to avoid contamination.
We have small appliance and household waste recycling through the city,
and film plastics recycling at Sprouts,
and electronic waste recycling through work.
I’ve even found textiles recycling for shoes and clothing that are simply too thrashed to be handed down or donated.
Tending to our Net Worth update, I signed in PiC’s Chase account to check some balances and my jaw dropped.
WHAT IN THE SAM HILL.
WHERE ARE MY POINTS???
I had to nag them for Six Frakkin Months to get my rightfully earned 100,000 points for opening a mortgage with Chase during their promotion for massive points for doing a thing we were already going to do.
The reasons? I have never had my earned points or miles tied to keeping an account open so it literally didn’t occur to me that they would be (even though YAPFB TOLD ME), I completely missed that we only have 30 days to cash them out in the Rewards Agreement, and … there’s no real excuse. This was my own damn fault.
Over at MarketPlace, Tanja breaks down “How to save twice your salary (or more) by age 35“. She started with a zero net worth at age 28 so she knows some things. As always, I never think “everyone can do it because I could” but rather “there’s always something we can learn, it might help”.
Roxane’s piece is painful to read. The things she has had to go through because our society is so incredibly judgemental.
Ah ha! Neuroplasticity and Novelty Effect! The reasons I keep researching tropical vacation deals, or seeking the next freelance gig, even while I’m stretched out on the sofa comfortably going about my routine and know that I can’t commit to anything like a new volunteer gig or workout routine: “….when you make time for new skills that are personally interesting to you, the benefits of success are heightened. Your body will actually release more dopamine when you achieve goals that your mind has deemed more interesting and fulfilling to your core interests and values.
….The novelty effect is a particularly strange psychological phenomenon that shines a light on just how finicky the human brain can be when it comes to feeling renewed and ready to go back to work. Research has uncovered that your performance at a task will initially improve when a new technology or process is introduced. That’s right—you can instantly get better at something old simply because your brain will be interested in the new process on the block.”
Imagination Town
On Money
I’m loving Angela’s 
Tending to our Net Worth update, I signed in PiC’s Chase account to check some balances and my jaw dropped.