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 19, 2017
I’m a recovering workaholic and it’s been 6 years since my last real* vacation.**
*defined as a time where I wasn’t required to log onto work and I didn’t do it more than once out of worry that something had become a steaming pile of waste on fire.
**maternity leave doesn’t count as a vacation in any stretch of the word and I will slap you with a wet fish if you try to argue with me about that. Fair warning.
Despite my recovering workaholic label, this isn’t entirely a situation of my own making. I didn’t mean to go this long without a true break. We haven’t just been sitting at home, dully Kermit-flailing at our keyboards in an endless grind. We’ve logged more travel for fun days in the past few years than I have in my entire career before this! It’s just that I’ve been making it work by doing it all, at the same time: traveling, working, and now, also parenting.
It hasn’t been without its flaws but it has included some amazing food so it’s hard to argue against the logic that if I can have it all, by doing it all, why not?
Because when you’re a recovering workaholic, you shouldn’t be looking for reasons to keep your work strapped to your hip!
Truly, the trouble with knowing that you can’t coast on talent, knowing that you made it to this point in life or work by dint of unbelievable amounts of hard work is that it’s incredibly hard to care about the research that says taking a break and refreshing your brain is good for you AND your work. That was my problem, early in my career. Stepping away meant I was losing ground and will have to work harder to catch up on my return. Like Leo McGarry (The West Wing) who didn’t want to take out the time for his AA meetings, I don’t want to be a half hour dumber than everyone else!
But that’s stupid. For one thing, information acquired as it develops takes far more time than catching up on most situations to get up to speed. It actually only took Leo about three minutes to arrive at the same place everyone else was waiting, for their next update. Surely nothing at my job is so complex or critical as Aaron Sorkin’s fictional White House, The West Wing version! (versus the American President version which is a whole other thing).
For another, your brain is a resource and running it continuously without respite is shoddy brain ownership. Even actual machines need downtime and maintenance.
What’s my point? My point is that even knowing all of the above, it’s been six years since my last vacation.
Money is about to be anywhere from pretty tight to OMGTIGHT, but you know me, I’ve already made contingency plans. I have a stockpile of points / miles and I will plan a real vacation.
But my laptop may still come with me because my addiction to being connected is not on the table for discussion at this time. One problem per post, please.
Assuming a small budget and travel companion who varies from being an utter delight to a tiny terrorist, and a preference for being with Seamus rather than boarding him, I think we may be talking road trip!
Colorado? Canada? Washington?
:: Where would you head after a long vacation drought? When and what was your last vacation?
April 17, 2017
There really is a good reason I haven’t had my dad move to a cheaper place yet. There aren’t any cheaper places to be had within a 50 mile radius of his current space (and also family support) so it didn’t make sense to force a move that would further isolate the two of them and save maybe about $50, if that, while also racking up moving costs.
He’s earning minor income on his own which is erratic, to supplement his SSI check which is small, but I pay for all his major living expenses – rent and utilities.
This month, a 60-day notice landed stating that they’re raising the rent by 50%.
As a renter, I’m horrified. As a landlord with some experience, I’m not surprised. We’ve been there a really long time and he hasn’t been good at upkeep these last few years. If he had been, I’m pretty sure they would have just kept on with the same rate. But even if we didn’t have huge house-hunting expenses coming up, we aren’t able to just absorb that 50% increase.
I had to have a conversation about what he’s going to do with him. That conversation didn’t go all that well. But this is a process. I’m weaning myself away from financially supporting him since he’s shown me that I’m not a daughter, I’m the Bank of Daughter from which you just keep taking.
That may not have been his intention, that may not even be how he feels. But it’s how I’ve felt since he royally betrayed my trust.
It’s taken me months to reconcile. It’s taken more months, and a bit of a housing crisis, then to figure out that I had to ask for help. Those were huge, unsettling leaps.
***
Facing down this history, and our upcoming expenses, I had to suppress the reaction that it was another problem that I’d have to handle.
I made myself leave it all in his hands to determine the next steps and what to do, with the understanding that I simply cannot shoulder this increase. That was uncomfortable and unfamiliar but it had to be done. We can’t keep going like this since I haven’t miraculously doubled or tripled my income in the last year.
***
At the moment, his plan is shaky at best.
The apartment hunt has come up dry, nothing within a 30-50 mile radius is reasonable, but he’s finally gotten the ball rolling on applying for housing aid which he should have done years ago. He’s also finally wrangled Trainwreck Sibling into getting evaluated for disability and housing aid as well. It’s about dang time. But this is the state of California we’re talking about – it’s going to take weeks or months for them to approve, if they approve, the applications.
In the meantime, he’s getting a job. It doesn’t pay much but he can probably come up with about half of the current rent for a few months. If it works out, he can come up with about 60% of the new rent after then.
While he’s doing that, he also has to keep looking for a new place.
All of this hurts my heart. I hate every bit of it.
For all the mistakes he’s made, he’s also nearly 70 years old. The idea that he’s going back to work kills me, turning on the guilt like a firehose. It also infuriates me to feel that way because I have been doing my level best for ages. These are steps he should have taken years ago, and in fact, it’s highly likely that his poor behavior of late has come out of his inability to gracefully accept my help. Instead of being glad he had a back-up and working toward independence, he’s spent this time trying to justify his acceptance (such as it is) of the help and acting rashly trying to free himself of his dependence.
This conflict sucks. But after sitting quietly with the discomfort, and talking it over with trusted friends, I am coming to an uncertain peace with it. These steps feel painful but they’re necessary. I’ll feel horrible about it, because I’ll always feel my duty to support my family, but there are times the support needs to be direct, and there are times that it has to be from afar. I’ve been doing direct support so many years, waiting for him to fulfill his end of the bargain and as a result, waited a decade longer than I thought it’d take.
I have pushed him to make changes for years, to no avail. That was all I felt that I could do at the time.
Now, though I hate how it’s happening, he’s finally stepping up to at least try to do his part. That he let it go until this late date was his choice.
So now that it’s finally happening, I can’t, I will not allow my guilt, to push me into putting him back on my soon to be seriously strained household budget. I can’t do everything for everyone and it’s a disservice to them that I try. Everyone needs to feel like they can do for themselves, that they are capable for as long as they want and need to be. Taking over for them when they finally show willing would be the opposite of support.
If this does work, if he does start to earn enough to pay his own way, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll able to leave the money resentments in the past and try to rebuild our relationship. I don’t know if it’ll happen, but this way, there’s a shot.
The other way, we weren’t ever going to have a relationship again.
It’s too soon to hope but I am open to the idea that it might be possible.
:: Have you ever had your housing costs skyrocket? How do you handle sudden unexpected increases in expenses?
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich.*
April 12, 2017
PiC’s eyes have been getting a little bit worse with every year.
It wasn’t that scary until we added up exactly how much vision he’s lost over the years. Then the thing that became apparent to us in all our emergency planning is that his eyeballs are a huge liability. Without his contacts, he’s effectively blind. He can make out the blob that is me, the blob that is Seamus, the streak that is JuggerBaby coming for his legs, if we’re within 2 feet of him, but he can’t do a darn thing about it.
Worse, a panicked or attempting-to-escape JuggerBaby flails wildly, dangerously. We know this because ze has already knocked his contacts out several times, leaving him half-blind.
On a less fraught daily basis, his day is much more frustrating when he has to stop and put in his contacts before he can do anything.
After getting some background info from Crystal, whose husband had it done, about the pricing and a few other friends who have had it done recently, we decided he should have a consultation with the recommended eye docs in our area to see if he’s a candidate. I wasn’t sure if he could do the classic procedure, or if he had to go with PRK, but I hoped he was a candidate for the standard procedure that’s been done many thousands of times.
The consultation was good. They were confident that they could improve his eyesight substantially and the results had a good prognosis for stability because of his age and gender. The one time being older pays off!
Now, to be clear, this is just about the worst timing possible for this on a financial basis considering the house thing. But we had committed to it before the house thing happened and JuggerBaby isn’t getting more coordinated. You’d think ze would be but ze is my kid so that’s not happening. He’s taken several more hits to the eyes since starting this post! It’s dangerous being a parent.
The quote for the LASIK procedure was $9250.
An additional benefit through his employer, the Vision Service Plan, netted us a 20% discount, taking that down to $7560. The referral from his regular eye doctor took another $300 off the bill, bringing that down to $7100.
They required a $1000 deposit before they’d book another appointment, so I jumped on the case. I called them for a cash discount – boom, $300 off, bringing it to $6800.
And because I don’t stop until we run out of options, I asked if we could leave the $1000 on our credit card and pay off the balance in cash, which gets us a tiny 1% cash back ($10.00). They normally make you bring in the full cash amount and refund your card, but heck, why not ask?
That, my friends, totaled up our discounts to 27% off the huge original cost.
The timing is / was terrible of course. We had some flexibility with our FSA but really, this wasn’t the right time to be paying so much more for essentially an elective procedure.
In many ways, this decision was more emotional than logical: for the first time, PiC felt vulnerable in a way he’d not felt before. As the consummate worrier and planner, I worried about an earthquake or fire or other emergency happening at night where you only have seconds to vacate, and certainly not enough time to stop to put in contacts! It was less worrisome when it was just the two of us plus dog. Seamus has pretty great vision.
On the logical side of the decision, we were looking at spending hundreds of dollars to replace his contacts thanks to the aforementioned knocking out incident and his glasses were woefully out of date as well. They both needed updating at the same time which usually costs near a thousand dollars when appointments and orders are said and done. I’ve never liked him being dependent on only one set of vision aid because it’s so easy to find yourself up Can’t See Creek and that’s not the place you want to get stuck.
We committed and I have never been more of a wreck worrying – what if something goes wrong? what if he sneezes? what if an earthquake hits during the procedure? This is San Francisco, it could happen.
Thankfully, the procedure seems to have gone well. The afternoon after the procedure was a bit fraught – it’s really hard to put in eye drops when post-surgical drops glued your eyelashes together! He hasn’t had any side effects like excessive itching or worse.
The clinic does day-after, 1 week after, 1 month after and 6 months after check-ups, and so far so good. We’ve had some close calls with JuggerBaby smacking him in his “special eyes” after the surgery which was horrifying but so far, he’s come through it ok. I’ll breathe easier when his last check-ups are done and he has a totally clean bill of eye health.
As for the bill, we’ll have them help us take it out of our FSA over the next few years so that particular pain is spread out.
:: Do you wear eyeglasses or contacts? How do you take care of your vision?
April 10, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income is two full time day job salaries. We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property. The goal is to replace our day job income before my health gives out and prevents me from working.
As a general rule, I don’t factor bonuses into our budget or projected income because they’re not guaranteed, but if we get any, they land in March. PiC’s company is more forthcoming with the compensation than mine is, so his is many times larger than mine. That would make me extra grumpy with a side of spicy if I thought about it too long. Remember, there are also very important non-monetary reasons to choose jobs!
We direct most of the bonus into the 401(k) so that’s filled up with a large deposit really early in the year. We won’t keep much cash but it gives us a tiny increase in take-home pay since the amount remaining needed to invest is vastly reduced. (more…)
April 7, 2017
I’ve been crap at putting recipes down these days, life has been keeping me running and adding another post in the week is oddly much more difficult that I expected.
This is a quick one that I threw together.
Ingredients
Small head of broccoli
Half a pound of green beans
3 chicken thighs, bone-in
Glaze
Half a cup of blush wine dressing
1 tablespoon of honey
2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
Directions
Saute the cut up green beans and broccoli on medium heat for about five minutes in the dutch oven. Remove the vegetables, then saute the chicken in a little oil on medium heat until cooked nearly through. Remove the chicken, and cook the glaze ingredients for a few minutes until it reduces to a thicker sauce. Place the chicken back in the glaze for few minutes, on low heat, and cook through. Add the vegetables back to the pot, and toss to coat with the glaze.
Serve with rice of your choice – we went with brown.
Afterthoughts
I made few mistakes with this one – I put the vegetables back in the pot with the chicken at the same time, not thinking about the time it would take to cook the chicken through, so they were softer than I liked. Of course, it then turned out that JuggerBaby likes zir vegetables unadulterated by such plebian things as sauces so they were roundly rejected.
Also, three small bone-in thighs just aren’t enough for our family, even supplemented with a huge pile of vegetables and brown rice, so next time I’d double the chicken but this makes plenty of sauce to go around even if I do that.
April 5, 2017
Skills
Dental hygiene
JuggerBaby has been very enthusiastic about the idea of brushing zir teeth, but zir execution leaves much to be desired. Typically toothbrushing goes something like this:
Mama, yeet? Bush yeet?
Ok, sure let’s brush teeth.
Mama, num num?
Yes, I put toothpaste on your brush already.
Mama, bush yeet!!
Yes, I’m going to brush mine too.
Then for the ten minutes, ze will lick all the toothpaste off zir brush, ask for more, go back to licking the brush when I say no, and then chew on the bristles while criticizing my technique. The bristles touch teeth maybe once, unless incidentally on the way to brushing zir tongue, or if I insisted on brushing them for zir. Of course the latter always starts a fight and ends in tears. Not my tears, though.
Sleep-FRICKIN-regressions
I didn’t know there were sleep regressions after Year One, especially one at 18 months and another at 2 years. At least I didn’t know until ze was nearly 25 months and then it punched us in the faces. Out of the clear blue sky, putting JuggerBaby to bed turned into a wailing, sobbing, desperate-to-keep-us-in-the-room MESS. For days, we tried to put zir to bed after the bath and 3 books routine, and every single day ze tried to monkey-parkour zir way out of the crib and catapult into our arms. Not because ze wanted cuddling, which is when ze is sick, or because ze needed food (ze sports a Buddha belly that could last a week on no food), but because ze didn’t want to be alone.
We tried leaving zir with Seamus. That was good for one night. We tried telling zir that we were right outside the door and that ze could call if ze needed us. That worked once.
Finally, we negotiated with the toddler-terrorist. Or rather, we caved. Each night, we would put zir to bed, and ze would say “Mama jeep? Dada jeep? Gigi jeep?” We were all to go to bed at the same time, in the same room. If we were good and quiet, ze would roll around like a mad cannoli for 20 or so minutes and pass out. If we bothered zir too much by talking or looking at work on our phones, it’d take over an hour. It got so bad that we were just all asleep by 9 pm for several days in a row. Nothing was getting done – our nights were effectively over by 6 pm.
After 3 weeks of being held hostage, I decide we were trying again. I told zir: “ok, we have to go clean up now, so you stay here and we’ll be right outside, the door is open if you need us.” This time, ze was open to it, saying “ok” and just asking for more massages before I left. I was cautiously optimistic, remember, this worked once before too and then 2 weeks of misery followed!
But it seemed to coincide with the pieces falling into place with toilet training. We had added 4 potty breaks to our nighttime routine: after dinner, after a shower, after reading, and one more time after being put to bed. Once ze was in this routine for a few days, it seemed that ze wasn’t quite as inclined to demand that we stay in the room and sleep with zir.
Clean up clean up! Everybody cleans up!
I adore daycare for teaching the kids a clean up song because it encourages them to comply when you ask them to help clear the table. Heck, JuggerBaby will start clearing the table when ze finished eating, even without being asked.
This can sometimes be inconvenient if you meant to eat it.
Toilet training
To be honest, I’d dreaded starting toilet training but so far, with PiC taking the lead on much of it, JuggerBaby has been pretty good at telling us when ze needs to pitstop. We have a 50-75% success rate, depending on the day and level of enthusiasm.
Super cling
This may be a phase related to not feeling well but where ze once hit the ground running and didn’t look back, daycare dropoff has become a series of persuasions, mostly to remove one tentacle-like limb off my leg, or the other. PiC has no better luck unless we’re both dropping off together, then ze dismisses him with an aggressive BYEBYE and keeps a possessive hand on my knee.
My working theory is that either ze doesn’t feel well or ze doesn’t like the chaos that reigns after a certain time when all fourteen kids are running amok. The one time ze ditched me readily was when no kids had arrived yet, ze happily linked up to the teacher and literally didn’t look back.
Things we bought
This is the kiddy version of washi tape which I won’t allow JuggerBaby to get into. (My precious washi tape!)
Daycare lets kids take a roll of painter’s tape and stick it on the walls, windows, and fences, and this is definitely something JuggerBaby now wants to do at home.
:: Did you ever have separation anxiety as a kid? Or an unnatural addiction to office and stationery supplies?
April 3, 2017
(With thanks to Ms. Steward for putting into words the title of this post I’ve been ruminating on.)
We’ve been talking about happiness a lot in this area of the interwebs.
Recently, Mrs. BITA discussed happiness portfolios which I LOVE. I assiduously tend mine, nurturing the connections to my loved ones every bit as much as I do our investment portfolio.
Much as I desperately want to, I can’t control everything, or pretend that happiness is an easily attained Zen state.
I can’t wish away pain, I can’t just decide not to be first trimester pregnancy-level tired.
I can choose other things, though. I can choose to support friends and chosen family during tough times, to celebrate with them during good times. Life can be a collection of these shared moments.
Then, Ms. Steward talked about the connection we make between our income and our self worth.
For me, coming from survival economics, it’s been a journey from needing money above all else, to knowing that it plays a critical role in our lives, but money is only one of many components of comfort and happiness. It’s natural that my self worth is linked to my income and net worth. There aren’t many tangible ways to measure success and money is one of them, naturally, because that’s usually how you see it celebrated when you achieve successes at work. If you do really well for yourself, typically, you can make a case for yourself to earn more money, because you’re worth more. That was the cornerstone on which I built my career. The mentality fed my fire to over-achieve, to build success on success.
That has evolved, though. Two Christmases ago, I reflected on our contentment. It was almost puzzling to realize that I truly was content. It didn’t seem possible, but here we are, two years later and I still am content.
Obviously that doesn’t mean life is perfect. It gets bumpy when you negotiate conflicting, deeply-ingrained beliefs, it stays bumpy when I still have tension over what my next career steps will be.
Thankfully, we learned the art of compromise and that gives us the flexibility to let go of a stressor, step back, and reassess, or to know that our partner will help us if we need a hand. That’s not something we could buy. It was a knowledge earned after putting in the hours into our relationship, developing trust in the scorched earth of my heart, by showing up, repeatedly, reliably, over and over, day after day. I could have bought a whole lot of therapy, I could have made PiC try to buy his way in, but we took the harder, more austere route – the one without easy credit card swipes, but much more meaning.
Don’t get me wrong, a surprise flower and donut will always put a smile on my face. The gift of actual gifts is not to be scorned! Hanging from a hook on the necklace holder he picked and put up for me is a deeply cherished sterling silver necklace from an early anniversary. They both mean a lot to me.
But as Maggie discussed, I don’t look outside myself for validation, to form the basis for my joy. Not anymore. My acts of service are rooted in what I expect of myself, though they be for others. My sense of achievement draws from my professional and personal accomplishments, but it’s no longer rooted in the salary I draw.
Penny touched on how difficult it is to move away from that mentality, and I won’t lie – it was the work of many years, and years of solid earning – to make it.
Sometimes it puts me in a hard place. If I can only feel fulfillment, that savory-sweet new fulfillment, when I do something that I consider worthwhile, it can be a long dry spell between flashes. External fulfillment is a much quicker fix. Swiping my card for a beautiful sweater on sale gives me something tangible to hold and enjoy. It ticks the same pleasure center in my brain that achieving a desired goal does. It shouldn’t, but it does, and I know it does. So once in a while, once in a long while, I take that shortcut.
I save rigorously so that I can afford it but that’s a zero-sum game and I know that fact even better. Spending isn’t the answer. It can be once in a while, and it’s no sin, but it’s a cheap mini Snickers compared to the decadent luxurious chocolate mousse of closing a long project successfully. No sweater will beat that sense of satisfaction of saving thousands by refinancing. It’ll tide me over but it doesn’t fill my well.
Right now, in general big picture terms, life is pretty good. Zoom in a little closer and there are a lot of empty spaces to be filled in, question marks to be replaced with answers, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable when everything is in flux, but they’re not in a dire state.
My life pie chart is best when balanced between my family, working productively, and nurturing friendships.
I draw joy, grow happiness, and achieve fulfillment by working to earn money, enjoying my family, nurturing friendships that I’ve built over the past two decades. I deepen the strength of our family and our relationships and that pays back dividends in love and support.
And here’s the other side of my happiness truth: happiness isn’t solely a personal choice.
It can be an attitude but unlike some, I have not yet reached the state of nirvana. My happiness can be impacted by the actions of others that increase or decrease demands on me. With chronic pain dogging me, it’s impacted by how my pain fluctuates, daily, hourly. It’s impacted by whether my contributions to the pie are matched by those I engage with or if it’s just all me doing the heavy lifting for a while.
It’s important to recognize that in this, just like most things in life, we only have so much control over. Without that acceptance, or acknowledgement of what can unbalance our happiness, how can we hope to rebalance it?
:: How do you seek long term happiness? What brings a smile to your face on a gloomy day?
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich.*
