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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April 9, 2018
We recently took on a young lady rescue, to Seamus’s mild chagrin, and my heart’s delight. I’m pretty sure we needed a second dog but the first few months will be tough because no one gets Seamus AND an easy new dog in the same lifetime.
Even Seamus’s first months with us were hard. He was learning the ropes of our household and I was battling his allergies: hives, broken skin, rashes, bathing three times a week, steroids which means 6 walks a day, and one (terribly embarrassing for him) accident in the house because he couldn’t wake me for a walk in time. Those demanding weeks and all his maintenance since then has been totally worth because he’s a lovebug, has perfect manners, coparents JB, and protects zir from all comers. He was and still is a big help to me during my tough days, helping me get up and around during pregnancy and during flare ups, and supporting me through the days when people aren’t around. I don’t expect quite the same from her but it would be a good idea to train her like a helper dog as much as I’m able.
Suffice it to say, new pup has a tough act to follow. But we have lots of training planned, plus lots of patience and persistence. For my own sanity, I have told myself to give her two months to start showing real improvement and the ability to fit in. That’s about how long I can maintain all training all the time mode, and I need the reminder that a perfect dog isn’t achieved in 3 days.
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April 5, 2018
PF Ladies have been having a hell of a time. Little Green Revelation talks about her incredibly tough year between parental health issues, home issues, and personal health issues.
Piggy experiences the ER for horrific accident but still realizes how lucky she is to be in a position where she can absorb this incident financially.
Will you be traveling to the EU? Do you know your air passenger rights in case of flight disruptions? This seems to be a handy set of guidelines to EU passenger rights.
An interview with a nanny for a psychic. This bit caught my attention: “I initially reached out to her because my (deceased) father’s spirit was following me around trying to get my attention. I asked him to stop but she told me that he was there trying to make it up to me for being a negligent father. He was trying to protect me now and wanted me to know that he’s there.”
Haunting runs in our family and is considered run of the mill. But if my dad tried to pull this, I’d be looking into banishment. We don’t typically go in for that in our family but no way no how no sir.
Nicole Cliffe on bigamous marriages in her family. We also have one of those stories. It’s weird.
I had no idea there was so much unoccupied or abandoned housing in Oakland.
Slate does a series based on the idea that “Every couple has one core fight that replays over and over again, in different disguises, over the course of their relationship.” Realistic or no? The very idea seems totally exhausting to me. We have had long standing differences of opinion, and backgrounds, but we acknowledge them, discuss why they’re important, and work out compromises based on knowing those things about ourselves. It’s a lot of work sometimes but it sure feels better than engaging in a lifelong tug of war like this couple. Also I think this is a remarkably immature read on risk-aversion, but is this actually common?: “I see risk-aversion as banality, boredom, giving into convention or family pressure or something like that. I hate this idea in our culture that you’re not an adult unless you feel frustrated and stifled and you hate your life. We equate maturity with the wrong things.”
Since when is adult life equated with feeling frustrated? For me, it’s meant freedom and stability and more freedom even with all the responsibilities I choose to take on.
Tiny food will always amuse me
April 4, 2018
We appreciate the little things that fulfill our sense of luxury but the big things are amazing because we can afford some things that were totally out of reach for me 20 years ago.
The pricey daycare
This is for all of us. Our local preschool wait list is 3-4 years long so we’re not specifically choosing this over the muuuuuch cheaper preschool, but I view it as a luxury to pick this particular option instead of a home care option. Home care options are significantly cheaper but since we don’t know anyone who can refer us to a good one, we just don’t have the peace of mind that ze will be treated well and that any violations or mistreatment of children will be immediately reported by the other people who work at the facility. Our facility isn’t perfect, but they DO self-report any time there are infractions where other people might dismiss them as “not that bad”.
JB LOVES the teachers at this daycare and all the resources they have: books, toys, iPads, desktops where ze can pretend to be me. They are located close to PiC’s work which makes dropoff much easier, we love that their schedule mirrors PiC’s work schedule so neither of us has to take precious days off to cover childcare on holidays.
Empty spaces
We have 2 cabinets in our kitchen that are almost completely empty. I have no plans or desire to add to it any time soon. It’s my favorite non-thing about the kitchen! The emptiness is a promise to myself that if we want to grow or change or add, we can without feeling claustrophobic and that we are committing to not expanding to fill every empty space just because it exists. We’re respecting the space.
My ideal closet is a half empty room, housing exactly what I need, a couple of extra lovely soft cuddly things for cold days and nights, and a wide open space. For possibilities!
Four legged friends
Seamus is a delight and a comfort. He keeps my blood pressure down, generates fabulous sleeping dog scent while he cuddles nearby, and intervenes when JB is driving us all loonytunes.
He brings pure joy when he’s sleep-roaching, when he’s converting a friend who is afraid of dogs into a doglover, when he’s sunbathing and grins with tongue lolling and stretched gaping joyful jaws. He requires a lot of hands on care and he’s worth every minute and every penny.
Travel
As a confirmed hermit, and would be shut-in, who hates to be away from her home and dogs, you would think that travel would be my last priority for spending. In some ways, it is – I hate paying full freight on flights, rental cars, lodgings. But it’s important so I travel hack to make it affordable. We live far away from friends and family so, as a purely practical matter, it’s the only way we’re going to spend time with a lot of them as they have families themselves and it’s no longer just a matter of driving across town and dropping in for dinner.
“Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” – Jennifer Lee
The non practical side of it is simply this: discovery. It’s so easy to lose sight of the world out there. It’s really easy to let our own narrow range of lived experiences come to encompass all experiences, to overwrite the wealth of the world’s beauty and inspiration because it’s easier and, for me, less painful to stay home. It’s easy for friends and family to forget that I live with pain as a companion every minute, it’s most definitely easier for me to avoid those exertions that bring on even worse pain. Hiking, exploring new countries, walking to new food experiences, riding horses through Scotland? That sounds fantastic, except that after the first flushes of excitement, I come home to my body. Where I live, the view never changes. It would truly be much easier to avoid travel. That ease makes it much more imperative that we don’t fall into that trap. Even if it costs money, takes a lot of time and precious brainpower, it’s a luxury that we can afford and should afford for ourselves.
In my family, travel hasn’t ever been a thing you did for fun. You traveled when you were leaving everything you knew, for good. Emigration, not tourism. Now that we can, we should.
Laurie described great reasons for international tourism more eloquently than I can manage right now, but Done by Forty reminded me of another one: our children are going to be raised by very different parents than we were. Our parents were immigrants who came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs. By contrast, we are basically wealthy people. Not just compared to our parents, compared to much of the world. As such, it’s even more important that our children be exposed to more cultures and languages and society with different values so they understand that there is so much more to the world than just what they know here.
:: What big extras do you prioritize?
April 2, 2018
On Money
Income
Our normal income comes from two full time day jobs.
We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property and investing in dividend stocks.
Our side income comes from Swagbucks, infrequently selling on Poshmark, using cash back sites like Ebates, Mr.Rebates, and tracking activity through Achievement (my introduction to it).
The long term goal is to replace our day job income before my health declines enough to prevent me from working.
***
NOTE I didn’t realize many people thought that cutting off Dad meant we’d be rolling in cash. How I wish that were so. We had to cut him off because our expenses skyrocketed (tripled) when we moved last year!
That, in the process, he was revealed to be a terrible person was just the awful icing on a crappy cake.
Tax refund! Our refund is going straight to savings, as it always does, though I did have to temporarily borrow some to cover bills I paid for April early.
March 29, 2018
Kitten photoshoot
Liz, the Chief Mom Officer, had Chief Dad Officer share his story of nearly dying
I try to only invest in ethical companies but it’s awfully challenging when even companies who self-police in pursuit of meeting ethical standards find human trafficking in their second tier suppliers (the mills that take raw materials and produce the fabrics etc): “…considering this, the findings of Patagonia’s audits take on a different cast, a sign not of corporate hypocrisy, but of the near impossibility of treating workers well at every step in the production process, even when a company is genuine in its desire to do so.”
Maggie and her money
This made me laugh: how comparison is the theft of joy, experimental monkey style. This is how I am with salaries in my own field so in some ways I have to force myself to stop looking at what other people are getting paid other than to set a benchmark for myself to reach. Otherwise, I still maintain that social media is what you make of it. I don’t spend time on social media that makes me compare myself unfavorably to a limited snapshot of another person’s life. This is why long form blogging will always be the best for me. And let’s be honest, Twitter is right up there. Twitter and my tweeps have kept us fed, literally, when I couldn’t dredge up the brainpower to figure out what to make for dinner.
Thanos v Cap and Scarlet Witch
March 28, 2018
Back in ’15, I decided to slow churn cards on a regular basis, even if we didn’t have a specific trip goal in mind.
Quick notes:
- We still don’t have a specific trip in mind yet but I have my sights set on some kind of an international trip next year. For about 5 seconds I wildly dreamed about hiking through Patagonia but my body reminded where I live. Hahah, no. Dammit.
- For the purposes of figuring out whether we’ve wasted money on a card or not, I’m estimating the total value of our miles or points for each card to make sure that we are earning at least our minimum profit per churned card but we won’t know the true value until we actually redeem them.
- We haven’t been respecting the “no annual fee” rule for the past several cards as long as the miles or points bonuses were at least worth twice as much as the annual fee, if not four times as much.
- We ALWAYS pay the card balances in full. No exceptions.
- We time our churning activity with necessary spending. We never manufacture unnecessary spending for a card bonus. We’ll pass on a card before we do that. I keep a spreadsheet to track expected large expenses for this. (more…)
March 26, 2018
There’s been a whole lot of chatter on the interwebs about what income level you need to be considered middle class, or more.
My contribution early on was that a household income of $100,000 in most places is what I consider upper middle class. That wouldn’t sustain us or our current lifestyle in the Bay Area. We wouldn’t be able to afford daycare, or travel, or eating out. We probably couldn’t afford this house or our second car. We’d get by but it wouldn’t feel good.
Nevertheless, I started to feel wealthy a long while ago even though our salaries are laughable compared to Silicon Valley friends or more highly educated colleagues. That’s because I truly appreciate the value of certain small things.
BOOKS!
Reading the calendar, I see that our daycare is going to have a Scholastic Book Fair in a few weeks. I asked Twitter if they were pro- or con- SBF because I don’t know much about the program. Penny assured me that they’re great about giving teachers funding support which made my heart sing. Buying a book because we want to read, because our kids love to read, that’s the stuff that feeling rich is made of.
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