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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February 9, 2015
Bah, I knew that I’d have to renew the home warranty but that crept up on me really fast. Part of a warranty did come with the purchase of the house so that was an unexpected boon but I’m still not happy to part with a big chunk of money.
The alternative, though…!
My property manager recommended picking up a basic, plus 7-star plan, plus washer/dryer/fridge, to cover all the bases from the company they consider the best: Home Security of America evidently actually covers claims and uses reputable contractors.
Not to be confused with American Home Shield, the previous warranty company, and reputed to be an absolutely horrible company according to both my prop manager and Steph. That report is not hard to believe, incidentally. AHS was called to complete some minor repairs two months ago and they’re still dragging their feet. Boy, am I glad I changed away from them before we had anything serious happen.
HSA offers either a monthly or annual billing plan. I’d normally just do the billing plan to spread out the costs but chose to pay the full year in one go. I honestly don’t remember why but let’s pretend it was a good reason.
HSA even recently set up an online claims site. I much prefer to do everything online, especially so there is an easily accessible record and so I don’t have to talk to people for routine tasks, so that’s another point for HSA. Their price is a bit higher but I’d rather pay an insignificantly higher cost for assured better service. I’ve come a long way in my journey from being a tightwad to making wiser long term choices!
February 6, 2015
FYI: Not all of these LB-related posts will be in real time.
Full body rolls. Hellboy fists (knees?). Thrilla in Manila flurries of punching, kicking and flailing. Attempts to clamber up and excavate my ribs. Probes at the belly button like it’s a skylight and exit. This child had better be an athlete directly out of the womb.
There’s possibly nothing more convincing that I have next to no true control over this pregnancy and how it progresses aside from taking care of myself as best I can, as suddenly experiencing and watching a critter moving around inside me. I haven’t been steering any ship, I haven’t actively shepherded this growth situation. I’m almost just a person with a sidecar attached. It goes where I go and eats what I eat but otherwise …
And yet all this while, LB has been baking into an actual human with tiny limbs and opinions about which way we should be oriented, or what the best thing to eat or drink is. At each check up, the doctor says, approvingly, everything appears normal and we’re “measuring exactly right” and it feels like validation but I don’t know what that really means. I expect it doesn’t matter as long as LB continues to grow and move around.
It’s continually surprising that while I’m basically living life: working, cleaning, trying to drink a lot of water, eat healthily and be a little more active than usual, there is a micro-universe in my abdominal region.
Which begs the question, where the hell have my abs gone? Not in a “where’s my six pack?” way. Or not solely that anyway, but when I sneeze, or try to sit up, which should normally activate the core muscles, there’s just this scary half clenchy feeling like my abs took off and left a gone fishing note behind. It also takes on this creepy cone shape and frightens the hell out of witnesses.
I’d been mostly lucky: I passed the 3 hour gestational diabetes test with distinction, I gained weight slowly and responsibly so my doctor quit cautioning me about rate of gain.
Then again: there were other issues. The fatigue continually compounded, constant infections that the doctor chalked up to stress, getting a cold-plague three days after getting the flu shot, then follow that up with the rash from hell.
This endeavor remains one of the toughest marathon projects I’ve ever committed to.
Still, things tick along. I get bigger and slower and more tired (how? HOW is that possible?) with every passing week and some days PiC stops in his tracks with a “whoa. You grew again.” It’s true. I did.
There’s a strange smidgen of pride that this is really happening, even if I’m not having any fun, that my broken body stepped up to the plate instead of refusing to engage. I really had no control over that, we had no idea if we’d be able to conceive given all the health issues I face. There’s also the occasional flutter of panic, born of my control for the sake of sanity personality, that things are about to undergo an upheaval the likes of which we’ve never experienced. There’s some curiosity about who this little person is and will become.
I catch myself mourning Doggle, again and again, that he’d never meet his human sibling. He loved the smell of babies and all baby things, he’d have been in heaven sniffing over all the baby gear.
There’s a strong sense of mingled anticipation and nerves as the last weeks of the pregnancy seem to fall away like autumn leaves.
February 4, 2015
Life with DOG!
There’s no time that watching a dog sleep isn’t funny and Seamus is no exception.
He curls up so tightly that his back legs are tucked under his chin;
sticks his tongue out while sleeping;
snores, sleep-growls and barks;
startles himself out of sleep and he glares like I did it;
is likely to be on his back with all legs waving in the air about 60% of the time.
Also, I love it when he’s on his back, rubs his face with both paws, then topples over.
Medical woes
A bit of waltz with this fella. Skin looks horrible, skin improves, skin gets bad again, skin improves. We keep experimenting to see what gives him the most relief for the longest period of time.
A Dog and Our Money
This guy eats quite a lot. Easily 30% more than Doggle did and he still acts like he’s starving before the afternoon is over. His bones aren’t showing anymore, seven or eight gained pounds later, so we’re being careful not to overfeed him since his activity levels aren’t very high. He obviously doesn’t much appreciate that.
I had some luck picking up his special grain free diet at about $1.50/lb from petflow.com with a 20% discount, but aside from those one off special deals, our best bet for this particular brand is the local PetClub store. With a minor sale or coupon, we can get pretty close to $1.50/lb from them.
In case the medications alone aren’t doing the trick for his health and we need to change his diet, we may try a Twitter recommendation of the Kirkland Signature Nature’s Domain which is apparently just a repackaging of the Taste of the Wild brand. This recommendation comes from someone who only feeds her dog the best so I’m reasonably certain that it’s a decent high-quality alternative that would be good for him.
February 2, 2015
The Frugalwoods beat me to this topic. 🙂
I was on Twitter bragging on PiC, as usual, the other weekend.
This time it was because he made me breakfast in bed. No reason. The night before, he’d asked if I wanted to put in my breakfast order, and in response to my “You must be joking” face, he wrote up an awesome “room service menu”. He not only promptly fulfilled that breakfast order in the morning, he went to run errands so I could rest and then came home bearing the gifts of cinnamon rolls from a specialty grocery that Linda had just recommended on Twitter that very morning. Note: I’d just mentioned that it’d be nice to look out for them. That wasn’t a coded hint.
After I shared this, she jokingly said if we were on reality TV, I’d be the target for some good old fashioned catfighting.
Naturally I had to escalate the bragging and point out he’s not just this awesome to me but also to my good friends. He’s great about taking care of them as if they were his friends first when they’re visiting and as Exhibit A, called in SingleMa to attest to his awesome… only that backfired as she confessed to liking him better than she likes me. HARUMPH! He’s not even ON Twitter and Twitter is always on his side. Oh, to be so charmed.
[I’d say charming but I can’t characterize him as such since there’s some connotation in my head of that being a conscious effort or an intentional thing that is cultivated and the very charm of his wonderfulness is his consideration of others is sincere and instinctive and not at all calculated.]
But it warms my cold shriveled heart enough that I can almost forgive the fact that they’re always siding with or defending him on Twitter when I jokingly fight with him.
What’s my point? Other than the fact that I highly appreciate my fantastic spouse?
Valentine’s Day is coming up and, as usual, it will be observed in my traditionally avoid-it-entirely manner.
For one thing, it’s a Hallmark holiday. For another, wasting money on an overpriced meal out, flowers, and unnecessary gifts do not spell out L-O-V-E.
Forcing the fake romance is a surefire tactic to irritate the crap out of me:
First, by making me get dressed and leave the house. I choose to be a hermit for a reason.
Second, wasting time trying to park in the city because that’s always an exercise in not lobbing Molotov cocktails at horrible drivers. Mentally of course…. Just mentally…
Third, wasting money! Oooh the sin of wasting money! Money that could be buying me more comic books or another set of stocks.
Fourth, you can’t buy a healthy relationship. There’s nothing broken in a relationship that a Valentine’s dinner will fix. Just like marriage isn’t a bandaid for a relationship with commitment problems, Valentine’s Day isn’t the secular version of rogue Catholics selling indulgences. This doesn’t solve anything.
When everything is well, when you’ve put in the hard work to build a healthy relationship, there’s nothing a dozen dozen roses can say that a single one wouldn’t say just as eloquently.
I’ve said before, the truest path to my heart is not through opening the wallet, but through the little things that say you’re in this, together and wholeheartedly, whether that’s in a semi-crappy hotel room or safe and snug at home.
This time last year, we were a different and smaller family, soon to find out we were going to become parents to a wee human.
This time many years ago, we had just discovered each other, embarking on the start of a long road hand in hand.
This time many years hence, I hope we’ll be enjoying the fruits of our labor, with pride in our accomplishments: a happy healthy family, reflecting on meaningful careers, secure in our finances.
What is your Valentine’s (or anti-Valentine’s) wish and tradition?
January 30, 2015
Change from end of 2014: 1.75% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn a bit of extra money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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I didn’t anticipate having any reason to be pleased pulling together this first of the month net worth summary, but I forgot that my CDs with Ally pay out once a year, so hey! Nice little addition to the bank accounts.
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Had reason to be extra grateful for our health insurance coverage. Not only does it cover all of my prenatal related visits, not only are all the OB nurses much nicer than I expect them to be (I don’t know why I always expect them to be a little mean), the prescription side for the unfortunate plague of spots added up really fast. One prescription would have cost $128! Instead I paid $10.
That’s not to say ALL of them are competent, as I discovered to my chagrin one weekend, but by and large we do ok with the HMO.
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Even with one unplanned burst of generosity, we managed to keep Christmas gift costs down to around $300. This is, I’m pretty sure, a little better than we’ve done in previous years that included last minute panic shopping.
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January 28, 2015
Ironically, one of my what-ifs actually happened just as I was in the middle of dealing with insuring against it….
I was in the process of backing up all our photo files and had recently gotten the first phase done: back up to an external hard drive. I’d been haunted by this horror of losing all the important stuff, sowas on a kick to back up everything I could, work and photo-wise, to hard drives and the cloud.
Work was relatively easy once the first full back up was done – that bit took ages but it was done and the back ups run automatically.
Photos and personal documents, though, are scattered across more than one computer so I started with adding them to one unified hard drive first. This was partly driven by immediate need; my phone was staggering under the weight of the thousands of pictures and videos stored there and was threatening to kick the bucket entirely. All those files were actually automatically backed up via Google but I rather foolishly assumed, and didn’t confirm by trying it, that there was a way to download all those stored files easily.
Having pulled all the files off the phone and saved them to the hard drive, I should have also temporarily stored the whole kit and caboodle to my working laptop. Hindsight, ever is it 20/20.
It slipped my mind, so you can just imagine my mini heart attack when I plugged in the external hard drive this weekend and found that it was corrupted.
After 2 hours of Googling, testing and troubleshooting, it was relatively clear that this was a corruption that’d probably require actual professional data recovery. With all the Little Bean expenses looming, though, spending several hundred dollars on this was not an option if it could be helped so I went another route. If I could retrieve all the data then I could just reformat the drive and save a new set of files (which would now also be backed up seventeen other ways!)
Except there was no easy “Download all” button on Google Plus.
!!!
With thousands of precious photos of Doggle that were now only in one, poorly accessible place, I just went into silent FIX IT NOW mode.
Relatively silent.
Tried Google Drive, no love.
Tried downloading albums, but since I’d not organized all the photos into albums, downloading from there was no good as it ignored anything not in albums.
I flipped out a bit on Twitter, which brought the amazing @daNanner to my aid, with suggestions of using Picasa to pull the whole archive off G+, but alas, still no good.
Further Googling was fruitless, so I resigned myself to painstakingly downloading each image one by one. This was a huge pain, to go from oldest to newest, you have to load the entire archive.
Then @daNanner popped up again with another suggestion: Google Takeout. Her Google-fu is strong, this was the answer!
It took an hour to download everything into zip files, another dozen hours to download the SIX 2G zip files, and yet another five to sort them because the archive files were a complete mess but the photos are saved and destined to be saved as many ways as I can think of: two external hard drives, a laptop hard drive, a backup program like Backblaze or Crashplan.
January 26, 2015
PiC and I finally went to London!
It was a short trip but we’d been talking about doing it for years and an opportunity came up that we couldn’t resist. Besides, with LB on the way, I don’t anticipate international trips figure large in our immediate future.
We had a good wander about: we explored Covent Garden, had fish and chips, and visited with some friends we don’t see often. I loved that display of Paddington Bears – for years, as a child who only explored other worlds through books, the adorable bear in a yellow hat represented England.
Due to my very limited energy, we saw a lot of things in passing but didn’t stop in for a full gander: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, a statue of Abraham Lincoln (???), The British Museum. We waved at the London Eye, feeling too cheap and pressed for time to actually go up, that’ll be for another time when the weather is more certain.
We spent some time in a smaller neighborhood, exploring the local cuisine and shops, picking up more than a few specialty chocolates to bring home. I’d told PiC for years that chocolate from across the pond was different and he was more than willing to indulge in taste tests with me.
Next time – and there will be a next time! – I’d want to do a little bit more than we did this time but it was a good relaxing visit.
Usually when I travel internationally, I make it a point to learn to like a new food but this time was more about sharing my favorites with PiC.
Travel Costs
We flew British Airways coach, and while it was no great shakes back there in coach class, it was still better than our usual domestic airlines by a good stretch. Maybe not better than Virgin America Main Cabin Select, but we don’t often splurge on airfare, especially on international travel. Someday though, we’ll have enough money that first class won’t be but a drop in the bucket. SOMEDAY!
I tried to use miles for the flight but as it turns out, BA miles are pretty worthless for international flights. They’ll charge a fuel surcharge that is very nearly the same as the cost you’d have paid for the ticket out of pocket. I saved them for another time.
I did redeem a truckload of Chase Rewards points though. I had the option of using them to book flights, hotels and car rentals directly for an extra 20% boost in points but they weren’t any good for our destinations. We weren’t going to drive and none of the areas we’d planned to stay were on the list of redemption hotels.
The best value was to book lower cost hotels and just redeem the points for cash. We had enough bonus and regular points to redeem for a thousand dollars in cash which nicely defrayed some of the travel cost.
Experience-wise, that was the best choice I think, as I picked places with pretty fantastic breakfast spreads. Seriously I think we breakfasted for three hours one morning.
