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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June 16, 2014
Change from May: 22% increase
Change from January: 61% increase
On Money
That wasn’t an anticipated, or even mostly a real jump, in Net Worth. I should really get my act together on tracking Net Worth – you’d think that I’d have plenty of practice at this but I totally failed to incorporate the home equity we have; the mortgage liability was included but hello, we do own part of the property. So whoops. Since I don’t feel like going back and correcting every month since January, I have an artificially large increase.
About 3% of that is a legitimate increase though, we had good deposits in the retirement accounts and have been saving steadily with every paycheck.
***
And the deed is done! We have canceled cable and sent the cable box back. We’re now entirely on Roku and while this means I probably won’t be up to date on Hawaii 5-O and Grimm, I am enjoying The West Wing, Studio 60, Downton Abbey, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and other Doggle-approved shows playing during the day from the comfort of behind my laptop.
***
Even without knowing that our NW was increasing at least incrementally (actually, I tend to assume we’re overspending at any given time), I have been fighting the urges to spend. I want new pillows. I want to swap out a quarter of our furniture for more comfortable stuff like a recliner (for work I swear!), a dresser so I can start to organize that unholy mess that is our closet, a library while I’m dreaming…
In the meantime, I’m doing what I can to earn Amazon money through Swagbucks for the smaller things we need. Feel free to join and help me using this referral link if you like!
On Life
Two Sundays ago, I woke up late. Uncomfortable, as usual, I lay abed for another hour, and finally rolled out of bed. As I wandered over to my desk, it sank in that my limbs didn’t feel inutterably heavy, and my chest didn’t feel like an elephant was sitting on it. Hm!
I actually felt capable of sitting up in a chair! I didn’t need to slump in the corner of the sofa, propped up on cushions, like I’d been doing for … the past five weeks.
The most exciting 70 minutes in 5 weeks ensued: I hopped online, paid some bills, washed a few dishes, ate some breakfast, cleared a two month backlog of mail, signed and sealed documents that needed mailing, scrapbooked several things left over from our reception, scanned documents for my records, sorted my money tracking document, organized photos from the reception into envelopes to be sent out, wrote a card and sorted two piles of leftover wedding crap for recycling. In 70 minutes.
The point I’m making here is if I could pay for energy, I would ABSOLUTELY do it because with this level of effectiveness, I could take on the world with a few months full of energy.
June 7, 2014
If I had to toot my own horn, I’d say that my cooking skills are progressing nicely. Luckily, I have PiC here ready and willing to proclaim my experiments successful. I know, this is meant to be a money-life blog so why do I keep sharing recipes? Because good food IS life!
I have to thank Kristen for helping me make a few basic decisions, since I didn’t know what I was doing when it came to dealing with mushrooms AT ALL.
Small Bites: Stuffed Mushrooms
This was adapted from the Pioneer Woman’s classic recipe.
Ingredients
24 ounces, weight White Button Mushrooms
1/3 pound Hot Pork Sausage***
1/2 whole Medium Onion, Finely Diced
4 cloves Garlic, Finely Minced
1/3 cup Dry White Wine**
8 ounces, weight Cream Cheese
1 whole Egg Yolk
3/4 cups Parmesan Cheese, Grated
Salt And Pepper, to taste
* Added a strip of fried bacon. It’s the right thing to do.
**Left this out.
*** I use any sausage, really.
Directions
1. Wipe off or wash mushrooms in cold water. Pop out stems, reserving both parts.
2. Chop mushroom stems finely and set aside.
3. Brown and crumble sausage and bacon. Set aside on a plate to cool.
4. Add onions and garlic to the same skillet; cook for 2 minutes over medium low heat.
5. Pour in wine to deglaze pan, allow liquid to evaporate. (Deglazed with water since I didn’t have white wine handy)
6. Add in chopped mushroom stems, stir to cook for 2 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set mixture aside on a plate to cool.
7. In a bowl, combine cream cheese and egg yolk. Stir together with Parmesan cheese.
8. Add cooled sausage, bacon and cooled mushroom stems. Stir mixture together and refrigerate for a short time to firm up.
9. Smear mixture into the cavity of each mushroom, creating a sizable mound over the top.
10. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown.
Allow to cool at least ten minutes before serving; the stuffed mushrooms taste better when not piping hot.
Thoughts
Allow to cool before serving – hahaha. I tried to try one almost immediately. Of course. And nearly burnt myself. Of course. Who doesn’t do that?
I’ve never loved mushrooms, but I’ve been trying to learn to like a new thing every few years, so this was my entree to not-in-soup mushrooms and I’m pretty happy with it.
Comfort Food: Chicken Pot Pie
Ingredients
1 pound chicken breasts – cubed*
1 cup sliced carrots (1 1/2 carrots)
1 cup diced potato (1 small potato)
1/2 cup sliced celery (1 celery rib)
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup chopped onion (1/4 small onion)
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 3/4 cups chicken broth
2/3 cup milk
2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts
1/4 teaspoon celery seed**
* I roast my own chicken so I used two cups of shredded roasted chicken instead.
**Left this out.
Makes 1 9-inch pie. 8 servings.
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C.)
2. In a saucepan, combine carrots, potatoes, and celery. Add water to cover and boil for 15 minutes. Remove from heat, drain and set aside.
3. In the saucepan over medium heat, cook onions in butter until soft and translucent. Stir in flour, salt, pepper (and celery seed).
Slowly stir in chicken broth and milk.
Simmer over medium-low heat until thick.
Remove from heat and set aside.
4. Mix chicken (and 3-4 strips of cooked bacon if you’re so inclined) into the vegetables.
5. Place the chicken mixture in bottom pie crust.
6. Pour hot liquid mixture over.
7. Cover with top crust, seal edges, and cut away excess dough. Make several small slits in the top to allow steam to escape.
8. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and filling is bubbly.
9. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.
Thoughts
I could have made my own pie crust but between roasting a whole chicken (about 1 hour, 40 minutes) and prepping the whole pie recipe, it seemed wiser to just use a prepared pie crust. As it was, I totally wiped myself out roasting the chicken, breaking it down and cooking up the pie in a three hour whirlwind. At least I didn’t defrost the pie crust too late and half melt it again. (See, ugliest pie ever.)
This recipe actually worked out a lot better than the previous one that I couldn’t find. The liquid was actually gravylike and held together the dry ingredients really nicely.
I’d estimate the cost of this pie to be around $5 without breaking down the actual use cost of each ingredient I already had (butter, flour, salt, pepper, milk) or will be able to use in more than one recipe (potato, celery, onion, broth, chicken).
It’s not all about the cost savings though, I just like the taste of homemade better, where I’m able to control the use of butter, salt, etc., to precisely what’s needed and not overdo it.
June 6, 2014
“You don’t have to eat in the dark,” calls out PiC, sounding vaguely concerned that I’d finally lost my frugal mind and refused to use electricity for just one person. He doesn’t have to say it, I know he’s thinking it.
It’a not untrue that I was choosing not to turn on the light because it was just me and my croissant at the table, but that wasn’t the whole of it. I could see well enough in the near dark, but sometimes it’s just kind of nice to sit in the quiet night, with a snack, maybe poking through a blog. You’d think I get enough alone time, working mostly away from people everyday and seeing only PiC most days of the week. It’s a darn good thing I married a man whose company I actually enjoy in spades!It’s been a lot of long weeks, slogging through work day after work night after work day, in the midst of a fairly intense episode of fatigue, pain and more fatigue. But it’s also been a lot of exciting stuff going on too, taking up all my energy and brain space. I can see light at the end of the tunnel and even if I need more recovery time than ever to struggle up to the surface, it’s still pretty cool that I’ve pulled this off. I can share some of it in a month or two, probably, once the loose ends are tied up.
In the meantime, introspection in the dark is just what the doctor would order, I think, if I actually found a good therapist who’d recommend that which was soothing to my soul.
I feel like Mal at the end of the first episode of Firefly: my best effort today was only 2/3 good enough, I worked til 1 am the day before so was dragging from sleep deprivation, PiC had to pick up my slack from this week and run to the vet for Doggle’s ridiculously expensive medication and do the grocery run for me, arriving home exhausted, late and grumpy. I’d managed to make a soup but it wasn’t enough to serve as a meal for a normal human that expends energy so even my “sorry I couldn’t run the errands but have a nice dinner” gesture was… Well, inadequate. In an attempt to thank me for trying to make the day end nicely, he knocked a glass over and spilled water all over my pants, in a move that is so typically ME (confession: I forgot how to work a glass two days ago and spilled water all down my front); it was just so absurd we had to laugh.
But at the end of the day, we’re still flying.
Little as that may seem, it’s enough.
(By the by, I did figure out the old family recipe and made it twice without disaster, so I’m calling that a win.)
June 1, 2014
We stood in the driveway, watching him “craft”. Once able to pick up a pencil, pen, paintbrush or lump of clay, and fashion realistic or fantastical pieces of art with no training, he’s now creating smaller lumps of wood from larger lumps of wood. Inside, a bit of me shudders, watching the hatchet in his hand.
There’s a limited range of things one can say to him, now, without setting off fireworks. Defensiveness, rage, imagined boundaries, bristling. Only his sister can cross those lines, he snarls, and even she doesn’t! PiC backs off. He’d only asked, “so what are you up to these days?”
I haven’t talked about my sibling for a long time. I haven’t talked to him, for some while.
It doesn’t meant that I don’t think about him, constantly. Or that my subconscious doesn’t dwell on the exhausting morass that our lives have become.
***
In August 2011, my dad asked me, did I think Sibling was on drugs? There was something really wrong there, and he didn’t know what it was. At that point, Sibling had been driving me batty with his machinations and manipulations going on fifteen years; we were at loggerheads over every last thing and the struggle to force him to grow up had become steadily more useless. He hadn’t done a single productive thing to lift himself out of the mire his life had become and over the years, he’d become more nasty and more violently opposed to cooperating with Mom or Dad.
My resolve hardened; he’d spent far too long on the dole as it was, he was actively hurtful and hateful to my parents and it was too much. He had to go and I had to be the one to make the separation.
I went to talk to him and there were clear signs that something was not right. His behavior wasn’t completely the usual manipulative and egocentric, it became literally delusional.
He explained to me very carefully in the same breath that while everyone was concerned about him, he was “linear” now, and he had taught his pets to speak the English language. They could now understand every word we were all saying.
He went on and on about his beliefs about his role in the family, that of “protection” and of misplaced need to be “security”. I backed away slowly, realizing that he fervently believed every word he was saying and that he was simmering with the paranoid need to prove himself which would and could manifest in violence against any one of us should he experience a break and perceive a threat.
Dad was unconvinced that Sibling posed him any danger but it was, and still is, hard to believe him. I don’t believe that all mentally ill individuals, or even most, pose a threat to the people around them. Many of them don’t. But we have a family history of mental illness, and a trend of delusions and violence, that I cannot ignore. A cousin who sounds scarily like Sibling in his ramblings has attacked and injured more than one person. Sibling’s misplaced white knight convictions sound like the beginning of justifications of something awful and twisted.
And amidst it all, Mom’s spiraling condition, much of the anxiety centered on her son, prevented me from taking the necessary steps of getting Sibling away from them.
***
Leaving home, and him, in 2010, purchased a slice of respite for me, but in its place simmered my own anxiety. My nightmares got worse. I still fought with him: over the phone, during visits, in my imagination, epic battles raged over his transgressions now only inconsistently policed from afar. PiC and Doggle were no longer startled by my waking up screaming at dream Sibling, going yet another round in endless rounds of desperate attempts to get through to him.
It wasn’t working. It probably never was.
***
Somehow, it’s still unclear who I was and am fighting with. Is this my brother the master manipulator or some teenage version of him? In some ways, he’s getting what he wants: free housing, “doesn’t have to” work. It’s hard to imagine that this is how he wants to live but he’s rejected every overture of help, every attempt to support his efforts at anything productive. Aunts have come out of the woodwork, offering to sponsor his education, trade or higher ed, if he wanted; nothing came of any of it.
He’s ended up on the doorsteps of childhood friends, acting as though he had rewound life back to high school. If you can ignore that displacement, when he’s speaking to you, it almost sounds like nothing is amiss. He’s adamant that nothing’s wrong but his disproportionate outrage at being asked what he’s doing or what he’s planning to do indicates otherwise; his obsessions and refusal to do anything to live at more than a subsistence level and his insistence that the dog is as responsible for understanding his needs as a human, it’s all disturbing.
He spent weeks obsessively doing laundry, running the machine over and over, day and night, until he broke the machine. He was washing and rewashing the same clothes (in defiance of Dad?) for no discernible reason. Dad can’t afford to fix the machine because it’s a large unbudgeted expense for both of us, and isn’t willing to get it fixed because the amount of water and energy spent was astronomical. Dad has to choose to do his laundry at a laundromat, taking hours out of his already tough schedule, because Sibling can’t be trusted not to do the same thing again in the middle of a drought and wasting hundreds of dollars.
Sibling wanders in and out, leaving doors and windows open, turning on faucets and leaving them running, leaving the stove burning til everything’s scorched beyond recognition.
I banned Sibling from using my car years ago, unable to afford the constant repairs of having a careless driver ding it up, and most unwilling to risk his having a serious accident and heaven forfend, injuring or killing someone. He snuck the keys anyway, and I only found out about it when I received parking tickets because he couldn’t even be bothered to put quarters in the meter when he stole my car.
Dad’s a prisoner, unable to leave the house for more than a few hours at a time lest he come home to a flooded or burnt down house, a stolen or wrecked car. In more than four years, he’s never been able to even say that he would like to visit me because it wasn’t possible.
Sibling requires some kind of medical care but you can’t force an adult to get evaluated and you can’t commit an adult against their will until they pose a clear threat to themselves or others. This makes sense: mentally ill individuals don’t always have people advocating for their best interests and they do have rights. But the fact that we have to wait, amid the slow soul-crushing erosion of our lives around the shambling wreck that is his, until someone is hurt or killed to get any help at all belies the idea that anyone’s best interests are being served.
***
His dog is as much a prisoner as Dad, or worse. He’s utterly pitiful and needs more healthcare than Dad can afford. The breedist community we live in doesn’t allow Sibling’s dog’s breed, even though he is the sweetest, smartest, most compliant dog we’ve ever met. I’m still trying to disguise him in some way so he can come live with us; but I know that adding the burden of a second 90+ lb dog to the household is going to be a strain on our budget and tax both our severely limited energies.
I can’t just leave him there, but so many things have to change. We need to at least double the dog allowance budget and that has to come from somewhere. Dad would never kick Sibling out, and won’t allow me to do it so long as he’s clearly incapable or unwilling to find alternative housing, so I have to find some other housing for him. Finding housing for someone who can’t or won’t to help himself is a challenge; more so because I can’t convince him to get a diagnosis, unless maybe I go and drive him myself to a doctor. I’m not even sure he’d cooperate then, he didn’t when Dad took him.
Impossible as it feels, I have to do something to change things. This steadily degenerating stalemate is untenable. So, from somewhere, I have to make the time and dredge up the energy to “fix” this as best I can. I’m awfully tired but there’s really not much of a choice, is there?
A similar NYTimes story that struck very close to home for me
May 26, 2014
Even though it’s a two and a half hour drive away, I think my favorite present (aside from delicious food since we haven’t actually really done birthday presents in years) has been our family membership to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
As gifts go, considering we don’t manage to use the membership very often, it’s really a luxury.
But I do so love presents that both give me what I love (OTTERS) and support a good cause (Marine life exhibition care and education; conservation and science programs). They spend 64% of their money on those very things, so probably they could do a bit better but I really love the site, I love how kid and adult friendly it is (if you haven’t played with a kid in their play area, you really should!) and it’s just … peaceful and lovely.
We recently met some volunteers who’d been working there for more than 20 years, which I think is rather incredible, and speaks to the dedication of the community to some degree.
Memberships are tax-deductible (a PF blogger favorite) and include free admission for one year, express entry and discounts.
What’s your favorite birthday gift?
May 15, 2014
Change from April: 2% increase
Change from January: 30% increase
It has been a very strange four weeks since the last update. PiC’s been swamped at work, working longer and longer hours. I’ve been swamped with work and juggling multiple non-work projects, some old, some new, none of which that I can actually talk about yet. But it’s all a lot of work and taking up so much brainspace while it doesn’t feel like there’s anything to report back. I’ve been saving money, spending money to make money, etc. Ye-up.
*
Abby’s post, Chocolate for breakfast, made me smile because in a lot of ways, that’s pretty much what’s happening here. I’m sleeping badly, working through the fatigue and just had a candy bar for breakfast because the recent heat wave has made my body swell up like Violet Beauregarde.
May itself has been a painful month, physically and otherwise. Two heat waves have my joints in total revolt, so I’m barely functional. Just barely. Mother’s Day always makes me even more antisocial than ever, but the day after I can usually remember the supportive, surrogate mother people in my life.
*
Nevertheless there’s been some MONEY progress:
Insurance
– have gotten a whole array of quotes for all our policies and am just a couple decisions away from getting the whole thing sorted. Rates went up thanks to my dad making a bad decision after getting ticket, and some mysterious extra charge on PiC’s auto insurance that I have to get them to correct and refund the difference.
Investing
– have made huge inroads into research, thanks to a really really good friend helping me. Usually I fly solo on these things but I’m no fool, if someone’s an expert and willing to talk me through things, hell yes I’m going to listen.
Cutting cable
– it used to be for PiC but now that I use the tv way more, I’ve been looking for a good compromise since we don’t see a lot of the up to the minute shows anyway and the channels we do have are crap.
1) I roadtested the Google Chromecast HDMI Streaming Media Player
on Kelly’s (Alterations Needed) advice, but it didn’t work out.
The price point was perfect ($30-35 on Amazon); the size and portability was exactly what I wanted (just a USB stick sized doohickey); and you can stream directly from your computer. Set up was dead easy. However, for us, it would only ‘cast Amazon Prime from my work computer as my other computers are too old; I’m not yet prepared to add a streaming service (Hulu, Netflix) yet, AND upgrade our internet, the streaming speed couldn’t handle ‘casting or give us a more than half-decent picture. So while we would have started saving 1 month after cancelling cable, it wasn’t a good enough substitute.
2) I then roadtested the Roku 3 Streaming Media Player
on Katie’s (@grlredballoon) suggestion and that has been 85% good. It was $90 on Amazon for the device and an HDMI cable; I don’t love the cable being visible but the device itself is tiny. It was very easy to set up and I can stream just from Amazon Prime now, and choose to add whatever other service in six months after the device has paid for itself and actual savings have been recouped.
Comparing the numbers against each other, it may seem like I’d still be saving more with the Roku at $30+$10/month for any streaming service right off the bat but I don’t think it’d resolve the internet problem; the Roku has hiccuped a few times but not with the frequency that the Chromecast did.
Cable: 34/month = 408/year
Chromecast: 35 (device)+ 10/month (streaming service) = 155/year + internet upgrade
Roku: 90 (device) + 10/month (6 mos streaming service) = 150/year
I’d love to upgrade our internet to something that’s actually good but the cheapest non-Comcast, non-AT&T option that I’ve found runs $170/month which is far too rich for my blood at this point.
I’ll settle for saving $200/annually for the moment and worry about the internet later.
*
Eventually, this month-long horrors that is my worthless barely functioning shell of a body experience has to settle down… eventually. *grump*
I hope you’re all having a much much better time of it than I!
April 28, 2014
I’m moderately techy, but only to the extent that I can get new tech and figure it out with the help of manuals and Google. It’s not something I enjoy or have the spare gray matter to spend on, so my favorite tech solutions have become the ones that are really quick to set up and simple to use. And yet I’m not a huge Apple fan. Go figure.
On one of my last international work trips, it was just easier for me to skip using my phone altogether because it was a bit too old, and my international calling plan options were nearly as terrible as roaming. I just used my iPad to make calls via Google Voice or Skype, depending on who I was contacting, and that worked well enough though I was at the mercy of finding free Wifi to make the connection (I still don’t pay for data for my iPad!)
It felt a bit pre-1990s, scheduling phone calls for specific times when I knew where I’d be and that I’d have a WiFi connection. It was ok since I was working and really didn’t need to call people so much, but still, when you’re used to being connected always, it was a pain to lose the instant communication of texting, IMing, and email.
Last year, I changed out our phones, carriers and plans: spent some big money to get PiC and myself good phones that should last a while (*crossed fingers*) and got us all (including my Dad) on a T-Mobile family plan with a very small company discount and saved some big month on the new plan. We pay $92/month for 2 smartphones and 1 dumbphone: unlimited talk, text, data on the Simple Choice plan. Our data is throttled after a certain amount but it doesn’t matter since it still works ok when throttled. It’s not fun but it’s fine.
Happily for my daydreams of easy international travel and staying connected, I discovered that T-Mobile’s really been hustling – they added another awesome benefit to the Simple Choice plan: free international data and texting!
They offer this in about 120 countries, and you don’t have to activate it, you just have to have a Simple Choice plan and your phone just has to be able to connect to the towers in the country of travel. This is the beauty of competition: T-Mobile’s Simple Choice plan lets you quit them without a termination fee, but they’ve made it so that you’re much less likely to want to!
With international travel (either for business or pleasure) on the calendar for this or next year, it’s relief to have this just built right into the existing plan so I don’t have that moment of panic at the airport, realizing I don’t remember whether I can use my phone without stratospheric charges. And let’s be honest, I want to be able to video call so I can see Doggle, I hate leaving him behind!
