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
Read More
July 5, 2017
What I watched
Man to Man
A Netflix exclusive described as: “Disguised as a bodyguard, a special agent must complete his national secret tasks while pandering to the whims of his ill-tempered world star.”
I really didn’t know what it expect but in my flu-weakened state, I was willing to give almost anything diverting a try to distract from my aches, fever and chills, and swollen throat. The fact that it was entirely in Korean with subtitles was a bonus for once – it forced me to stop working and actually rest. It started out as a light silly comedic take on a spy story, the actors’ expressiveness, or lack thereof, tickling my funny bone every few minutes but the plot thickened and the characters started to develop surprisingly quickly. Quite quickly, actors I’d taken for one-turn guests had become characters with a bit of depth and interest.
It’s fascinating to see the peeks into Korean culture, both as its portrayed on the screen (chicken and beer!) and also in how the actors act. It’s so different from American acting in subtle ways. It plays to the ridiculous, it uses shades of overacting, and yet employs so much stillness to convey thoughts, reactions, and meaning. These may be unique to this particular Korean genre, rather than Korean acting, but it’s effective and I love watching it.
Kano
I’d never heard of this movie before, we happened across it totally randomly. A story set in the time when Taiwan was still occupied by the Japanese, it’s a baseball movie but also a redemption movie, and a love story, and an interesting perspective on the Japanese occupation where the war wasn’t the focus. (more…)
July 3, 2017
Shopping, man alive I hate shopping.
We’ve been doing a lot of it for the new place but it simply isn’t growing on me. Obviously it’s still a necessity, even if my budget and energy reserves prefer MacGyvering a way out of the need to buy, but every so often, I reconsider whether we’ve been making good choices. Going through our belongings to winnow them down reignites that feeling that the less (trivial) stuff we have, the better, though we don’t have as many regrets as I thought we might.
I’m glad we didn’t buy ….
- Custom blackout curtains for JuggerBaby’s room: $300. We bought cheap paper accordion blackout shades to see if it would help zir sleep better for about $10. They’re inconvenient, being cheap paper with absolutely no frills whatsoever, but they’ve done the job and we won’t have to regret leaving them behind.
- A bigger car. None of the garages that we’re seeing in our region are big enough to handle both of our current cars without a squeeze, much less a massive SUV.
- An address stamp and embosser. The stationery lover in me desperately wanted one of each – so pretty – but the commitment phobe in me kept saying don’t do it. Turns out the commitment phobe was right.
- Custom designed checks. When my first 50 checks ran out, there was a $5-20 upgrade available for some awfully cute checks. But I’ve learned my lesson. In 2002, I paid $12.95 for 1200 adorable baby animals checks and by 2012 I still hadn’t used them all. It broke my heart to shred them when I closed that checking account. Because once in a while I’m achingly softhearted.
I’m annoyed that we bought ….
- All hair accessories that aren’t the standard clip-free hair tie, or tiny claw clips. I can use absolutely nothing else successfully but yet I still wasted money on a really nice and soft Blom headband that I never use, these nice black thin headbands to hold back hair that don’t fit my tiny head, and these cool spin pin things that would have held up masses of beautiful hair if I were Jean of Extra Petite, but I’m really not.If you noticed a pattern here, it’s that I foolishly fall into the pit of thinking that my hair and I are meant to coexist peacefully. We’re not and it’s well past time I learned that.
- A dozen undercabinet replacement light bulbs. Now that we’re moving, we have no use for this particular type since we’re designing our lighting to be as energy efficient as possible. I suppose we’ll leave them as a little gift for the incoming buyers if they pay top dollar.
I’m glad that we bought …
- My new cell phone. I’ve been able to download some money-making apps (Achievemint and Poshmark), take a ton of great pictures and video of my family, work while on the road.
- Two tank tops from Target. They cost a grand total of $12 but they fit just perfectly and look great. They won’t last forever so it’s sad that they immediately went out of stock.
- This simply perfect, though slightly pricey, Barefoot Dreams cardigan
. I used a gift card to reduce the sting. It was my plane sweater for our most recent big trip, and it was perfect! It was warm and cozy, but not too heavy, snuggly enough to wrap around myself and JuggerBaby who allowed it, and it has pockets which is a lifesaver as for a mom with only two hands. After our trip, it was exactly right for wrapping up when I was down with the flu, or when the weather turned unexpectedly chilly. This probably doesn’t seem like much but I don’t have any clothing that’s both ultra comfortable and suitable to be worn out doors in the presence of other people.
- Our recliner before JuggerBaby was born. It was expensive, and new, but it was the only way we managed to get zir to sleep some nights as an infant. It’s now a cuddle spot when we have visiting infants, and when JuggerBaby needs a comforting rocking.
- Comic-Con badges for this year. It’s a combined family visit and cherished tradition.
I’m still on the fence about whether I’m happy about buying a new home – it’s the source of quite a lot of stress right now!
There’s a theme here, of course there is. I tend to appreciate very utilitarian things over time, and fail to appreciate things that are mostly for form, and less about function. Here’s a conundrum: my need to have a stockpile of supplies that we’ll use versus my need to have less stuff and not waste money on stuff we don’t end up using.
:: What are some of the best things you’ve ever bought? Worst?
June 28, 2017
Over lunch with friends, my fortune cookie said: you will never need to worry about a steady income.
What’s your first reaction?
A) SCORE
B) Why, will I be too dead to worry?
My second fortune cookie said: You will always take on the hardest possible tasks in life.
That’s not a fortune, that’s a character indictment. So judgmental.
My third fortune cookie: You will live many years in material comfort.
Could they be the last years? I am happy to keep working to earn my way while I’m relatively young, it’d be nice not to have the “many years” dry up before I do.
It’s possible that I take fortune cookies far too seriously. It’s not at all possible that I eat too many fortune cookies per meal.
Ok, but big picture, here.
I’m not a risk-taker. I make highly conservative decisions at the best of times because I’ve known some of the worst times. Since I was 18, no job could be considered on the merits alone: challenges, opportunity, compensation. They had to be weighed with respect to the kind of sacrifices it would require from me, the impact they would have on my quality of life after I subtracted the time and energy required to do the job well.
Chatting with a friend who came to chronic pain late in life this week, they’re becoming burdened with the same uncertainty and reluctant awareness of their startling new physical and mental limitations. They’re taking steps back from intriguing job offers that they would have leapt at ten years before, declining opportunities that sound amazing and challenging with the queasy awareness that it’s amazing but very likely just too much for the new them.
Being a saver is definitely me, but it’s hard to tell whether I would always have been this conservative if a chronic pain disease hadn’t taken over my life. It’s also hard to tell if I can train myself to see past my limitations to find opportunities that won’t seriously negatively impact our lives even as they expand our horizons. Do such opportunities exist? I don’t know, but the first step is asking the question, right?
:: Are you an optimist or pessimist, a saver or spender? Do you save anything for the return trip, or do you put all your energy into your outbound journey, like the guys in Gattaca?
June 26, 2017
After spending an astronomical amount on my phone replacement last year, and PiC’s third replacement trying to crap out, it was way past time to recoup any of our cost possible.
Note: this review is months after my actual sale experience so it’s a little dusty, but you’ll see the reason for that below!
I first signed up for Gazelle but they offered a whole $8 for one of our old phones which is absurd. The phone works well enough if you’re not a power user, which I am.
After poking around good ole Google for a while, Swappa looked promising, so I gave it a try with one of our Androids.
This process is a little bit less straightforward than selling on Poshmark, but nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Useful tips
- The buyer pays for shipping – you have to build into your selling price.
- The buyer pays the Swappa fee – you don’t need to build in your price.
- Sellers are expected to ship within two business days of receiving payment.
- Swappa’s return policy: Sellers define their own return policies on their listing pages.
All seller return policies are based on the pre-condition that the device is received as advertised and in accordance with Swappa policies. No seller may deny a return / refund when a device is not as advertised.
To list and sell your phone
- Factory reset your phone. You could do this later, but it’s best to do it before you take the photos so buyers can see that it’s reset and turns on.
- Supply photos of your phone that show it can turn on, along with the sale code they provide you.
- Supply the ESN (which was incredibly hard to read on our phones because it was printed so tiny) so that the Swappa staff can verify that your phone is in good order.
- Write an accurate description of your phone and what it comes with. I’m still using my charging cord and wall plug for the Kindle, so I only listed the phone for sale with the protective screen cover and the phone case.
- Set your price. I used the current listing prices of the other equivalent phones as a baseline, plus a fee for shipping.
After several weeks of renewing my listing, I had a buyer!
I was notified first of the Paypal payment, then the instructions to ship arrived. I gave the phone one last going over to shine it up nicely, wrapped it securely, and took myself off to the post office where I decided to send it USPS flat rate for the tracking and the confirmation.
The buyer was a bit weird though.
I updated the sale when I shipped and provided the tracking number but there was no reply. Swappa sent him a comment asking him to confirm receipt and formally complete the sale – still no response. The buyer had a week to do so, but didn’t, and didn’t leave feedback either, so Swappa formally completed the sale for me.
A MONTH later, he emailed saying that the phone didn’t work, even though it was in working order when I shipped it.
Since it’d been 5 weeks since I sent him the phone and it was in good condition when it left my hands, as advertised, I offered some basic troubleshooting options and left it at that. He could have attempted to charge it back through Paypal, so I kept the money on the side to wait and see. It’s now been six months with no further communication so it might be safe to say that this one has been put to bed. I think.
Final verdict: My listing sold for $63 less the $7 paid for shipping flat rate with insurance. $56 blows the Gazelle offer out of the water, even with the minor inconveniences and irritations.
:: Do you sell your old tech or recycle it? Do you have a favorite site or store for resale or buying used?
June 21, 2017
I recently visited an overwhelmed friend to help with her laundry and play sounding board. Over towels and bath sheets, she confided in me. She and her spouse had been arguing over everything, she said, stressed by bad decisions, work, kids, work, kids, more stressful decisions. You name it, it was a fight.
In my world, most fights can be resolved by taking a deep breath and letting it out, several times, then figuring out what’s really getting your goat and dealing with that.
Sometimes it takes several hours, or even days, for both parties to cool down and start resolving the issue. That’s fine. What I don’t have time for is endless rounds of fighting over the same thing when the real issue at hand tends to boil down to both partners need to be respectful and/or considerate and/or more direct in some way that they’re not currently being.
That’s a simplification of course, but in general, that’s been a common theme among friends who complain about their marriages. There’s a big difference between complaining about a tricky situation in your marriage, and consistently complaining about the quality of your marriage.
In any case, I’m not a marriage counselor and I don’t offer advice unless asked. What I will do is help with the mountain range of laundry.
Y’all.
89 pairs and 6 stray socks, later? I was ready to fight someone. Leaving aside who needs this many pairs of socks? Leaving aside, also, “who needs 15 different sock styles??”, for the first time, my favorite task felt like an awful chore and no wonder. I wasted 45 minutes of brainpower on socks. I felt like climbing atop that mountain of socks and bellowing: take it all away! Simply your laundry, simplify your life, save your brain!
Reduce decision fatigue, stop wasting brain function on unimportant decisions. Make routines, give your brain the space it needs to be creative and productive.
I keep seeing this message.
Why is this at all a surprise? My best writing thoughts come to me in the shower, or when I’m laying in bed trying not to think. If I’m hung up on a work problem, the dishes get washed or the table gets picked up. In my better days, I’d go for a run. Now, Seamus gets an extra walk to shake the cobwebs. The mundane stroll through the neighborhood clears my assumptions or moves them aside so I can see the solution. Daydreaming and meandering is good for our problem solving.
The key to success is clear, isn’t it? Set routines! Set them for everything!
As a newish mom, I’ve lost the luxury of deciding that starting right now, like in my single and driven days, that from now on, I get up at 5 am, shower, work out, write write write, work work work, eat, work some more. Exhaustion would destroy whatever brain cells I had left, even if I wasn’t dealing with a baby that insisted on changing zir sleep/non-sleep routine every time I relaxed.
But I’m not doomed to suffer, ambition-free and listless, until JuggerBaby becomes a fully actualized human. I’m not doomed because I’m not a martyr, nor am I stupid.
I am going to set myself up for brain freedom and success by minimizing the mental and physical clutter. As much as I quirk an eyebrow at quoting Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify” for the sheer weight of privilege behind the fact that he could easily simplify by choice (and see Cait’s post on the privileges of choosing to be a minimalist), it does apply here.
Begone, home clutter!
Streamline the closet.
Good-bye to my weird organization system of past jobs. Professional clothes were once separated from lounging / casual clothes to prevent me from sleepily wearing a geeky tee and jeans to the business casual office. Now that it’s all casual, all the shirts /pants / sweaters are now reunited, organized by color, so that I can see everything at once. That’s step one. Step two is making sure that only the ideal wardrobe lives in my closet.
The goal: Mornings, I can grab a clean top, add pants, and voila! Dressed!
Subcategory: Color matching: weeding out most colors. I don’t want to think about whether this clashes with that. Well, not that I do much now but let’s never waste another synapse firing on that again.
Baskets, baskets, everywhere!
Between the dog meds to accompany meals, needing to walk Seamus and JB together, JuggerBaby trying to steal the dog’s leash, phones, keys, and poo bags, and and and … we have instituted a Basket Rule. Everything has a basket. No need to wonder where Thing is, it’s in the Thing Basket. Done.
Subcategory: Nix the (unnecessary) containers. We are battling my love of containers, great and small, and cutting the clutter. Less clutter = less to clean! Win win.
Make gifts easy (and the same)
I found myself asking Twitter for birthday suggestions for a three year old boy and what a load of brainspace that burned! I fell down a black hole of looking at action figures, educational toys, and costumes. Then a friend reminded me, duh, I give money and I give books. Done!
Same with wedding invitations. We have to travel almost every wedding to some remote place that is half impossible to get to without driving for hours and spending serious cash. There’s a trend for child-free events, and we can’t leave JuggerBaby in anyone’s care over a weekend, so we’re declining most invitations. Before JuggerBaby, we couldn’t fit in more than 2 weddings per year, and now it’s even less than that. I send a lovely Nidhi Chandani Everyday Love Art card with a check. Done.
Begone, professional clutter!
Ease up on the side hustle
I have a tendency to take on way more projects in the chase for extra income than there are hours in the day, or energy points in the universe. Instead of flailing about with 20 different projects, doing them all badly, I’ve made it a point to give myself a specific window of time to test out side money projects, and then permission to just stop if it doesn’t pan out, like with mTurk.
A project needs to slot in organically with my life now, and grow organically with the efforts that I put in, because I’m not about to replace my professional job with its many perks with a job that takes even more out of me than I can give, and jeopardize the balance of the rest of my life.
Delegate appropriately, then Back Off!
My bones were made in my professional career by taking on everything in the workplace, big or small, and knocking home runs out of the park with all of them.
There comes a time, especially when you’re managing a staff, to hand stuff over and only monitor progress, not do it all myself. I’ve been managing staff for over ten years now, and it’s still hard to fight the tendency to just quickly do something simple because I know it like the back of my hand with the intention of “helping”, but instead wasting my valuable time, and getting in my team’s way.
What else can I do?
I’m evaluating what I do as I go along, without spending vast stretches of time that I don’t have mulling it over, testing my theories and changing on the fly so the list above is just a start. This ignores the social capital aspects of our lives where we choose to spend time with our loved ones for fun and support.
There are definitely more ways to streamline how we do life and work, and I’d love to hear what you do in your lives.
:: How do you juggle your responsibilities? What’s essential and non-essential?
June 19, 2017
Listening to the West Wing the other day, Toby’s yelling about the need to consider options to save Social Security such as raising the minimum age penetrated my conscious brain. He pointed out that people are living decades longer than they used to, and Social Security was predicated on a life span that was considerably shorter.
As I understand it, you can start claiming benefits at 62 if you’re willing to accept a lower amount but for each year you wait until age 70, the amount increases 8%.
The archived Social Security site says:
If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.
It goes on to point out that if we look at the life expectancy after reaching adulthood, then we are indeed living a few more years than we used to.
Obviously, we have many awesome FIRE bloggers who would dispute this retirement age as the appropriate one but they’re (we?) an unusual segment of the population right now.
In my family, we either live well into late 80s and 90s, or we die before 60. If you make it to 60, there’s a solid chance that you have another 20 or 30 years ahead.
Whether they’re good years depends on whether they worked physically demanding manual labor jobs (high likelihood), how good their basic health was, whether they had access to appropriate health care if it was needed. Last and maybe the most important: did they save enough to last them during their later years?
I’d say the latter is a complicated question because, until now, retirement plans in our family have been “move in with the kids and be their childcare in exchange for full support.”
There have been some exceptions.
My amazing grandmother worked her own farm well into her 80s. She had enough saved to last her until her death and still leave a healthy inheritance. One aunt did the usual childcare thing but then moved out when the grandkids were too much of a pain – that’s pretty much unheard of.
PiC and I are the first couple in my family that I know of to actively plan to not follow the usual game plan of have kids, work all our adult years, missing their childhoods, and then depend on them for support while raising their kids. That model simply doesn’t work when there isn’t a cohesive community all around you doing the same which equips them to provide support as needed. We’re hundreds of miles from our dearest friends and relatives, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
JuggerBaby may be an only. We may want to grow the family more. We may try to foster and adopt if my health allows. There are so many possibilities and it hardly seems possible to plan for them all, but it must be possible.
We have been saving for retirement for years, I started when I was 21. I don’t have a FIRE date in mind but once the dust settles, I’ll decide what it is and our salaries together will work on reaching it.
I’d love to set it at age 40 but that’s just a pie in the sky number right now. We have to let the dust settle with the house, the renovations, the mortgage, and all that jazz before I dive headfirst into another massive plan.
:: When you plan to retire? Do you have grand plans for that time of your life or is that still hazy?
June 14, 2017
Skills
Complete sentences and abstract thought
JuggerBaby normally skips words ze can’t pronounce or doesn’t think are relevant. This makes for conversations more akin to translating pantomime and Choose Your Own Adventure than communication. It gets even fuzzier when ze slips into a play-pretend mode in the middle of a normal conversation. At dinner we might be talking about people ze knows, the food’s characteristics, and then suddenly we’ll be pretending to drink tea, or cooking. I’m sure JuggerBaby wonders why we’re mentally slow and why it takes us 5 minutes to catch up to zir imaginings.
As usual, the norm abruptly changed this month.
Out of the blue, ze started telling us “I like this!” Who taught zir that concept?? But munching down on some pastry, ze will cheerfully pipe up: mama, I like this!
And the next day: mama, I need water, please!
And then: no more stah-berries? No more boo-berries? Onee peach right now?
It seems like ze is grasping the more abstract concepts that we don’t always have exactly what ze wants, when ze wants it. That led me to thinking of how I don’t remember ever complaining of hunger as a young child. Though I certainly skipped meals with unhealthy regularity in the early days of this blog to save money, I will never forget to be grateful that my child has enough to eat.
Fruit according to JuggerBaby and language shifts
Stah-berry – strawberry
Boo-berry – blueberry
Peesch – peach
Backberries- blackberries
JuggerBaby’s taking liberties with the English language again. Suddenly everything comes with an “y” at the end of it:
Noy = no
Oh noy! = oh no!
Boy = bowl
appy ertay oo-oo = happy birthday to you
moy = more
Toddler portion sizes
Speaking of eating, it seems that JuggerBaby is finally eating about the recommended toddler portion sizes for a meal. From the point ze started eating solid food til about 2-3 weeks ago, ze has eaten 2-3 times the recommended-by-pediatricians amount, and has suddenly switched to a much lower gear and eats far far less. At first I was a bit worried but ze wasn’t starving, just self regulating. A few times it was really because playing during dinnertime was more entertaining than eating, but waking up two hours early and STAAAARVING seems to have taught zir a lesson in eating when the eating’s good.
Counting
Ze can count up to ten, but ze hasn’t made the connection between the numbers and the idea that they are used in a specific way. Ze used to count all the items on the dinner table, this is how I know ze knows 1-10, but ask zir to count at any random time and ze will cheerfully do so: one-two, one-two, one-TWO!
…. that’s six.
Reading comprehension
Ze is on a huge mimicking kick right now. Clearly both we and zir teachers are doing the same things when we read. Normally, when I read simpler stories to zir, I try to engage zir by asking what things are on the page. It’s backfired. Now ze insists on holding the book up and points at every illustration quizzing us: wat izzit?
Now I encourage zir to act out parts of the story instead. See me next month when ze turns me into zir very own thespian to direct.
Household chores
The industrious little helper monkey I always joked about has arrived! JuggerBaby now insists on peeling oranges for me, and vacuuming, obsessed to the point of falling to the ground crying when I hooked up a new attachment to the vacuum and didn’t give zir first dibs.
Too like a mischievous monkey, though. You can never turn your back on zir without possibly being leapt on. You might be unable to lift your left leg for reasons of 30 pounds of child suddenly latching onto it, or having that same child dart around you cackling and racing to shut the door in your face.
Helper monkeys may be more work than help.
It’s also really strange to see how zir empathy works, or doesn’t. Ze thinks nothing of slapping you across the face, clawing at you like a angry cat, pinning down a limb and trying to bite the belugas out of it. Not a drop of remorse to be found, and if you were caught by surprise and yell “ow!” ze laughs like a homocidal sociopath.
At the same time, I’ve explained that some games are too rough because my hands hurt and each time I decline to hold hands and play a rough game, ze gently holds that injured hand, asks “mama ow?”, pets it, kisses it and gently hugs me. Or ze will get wildly enthused about something, grab my painful hand, and even before I can wince, ze catches zirself and says “oh no! Mama ow!”
Even stranger, it might have been a few days since my hands were that dire, but ze will remember and scold me for playing with that hand, patting it and reminding me that it hurts.
It’s hard to reconcile the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flip flops.
Sweet sleeper
We always have our ups and downs but I cherish those nights when we have a peaceful dinner, quiet bathtime, go through a pile of books and then ze settles in for sleep. I’m not sure how it’ll work when we open up the crib so ze isn’t trapped anymore but ze usually has several good nights in a row settling in without a fight for a long night of sleep. The irony is I can’t thoroughly enjoy the peace because of my own recalcitrant body, but I appreciate the ability to lay down starting at 8 or 9 and stay put!
Precious #parenting moments
- JuggerBaby kissed me on the nose and then head butted me twice. That sums up our relationship pretty well.
- My two freaking year old just told me “I do me, mama, you do you.”
- JuggerBaby grabs my hand and shakes it: nice to meetchu!
- JuggerBaby hovering a piece of an orange rind near zir mouth: “ahh? ahhh?” Joke’s on you, kid.
:: What helper animal would you pick? What’s your favorite summer fruit?