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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March 12, 2014
A good friend and I were talking about money, charity and volunteering one day and he expressed an opinion that took me aback.
We’re so often in agreement given our remarkably similar backgrounds, we put ourselves through school, supported our families from a young age, worked really hard for a long time to get where we are, that I struggled to understand why he was against volunteering and charity.
While I feel that I worked really hard to get here, I didn’t get here without help; he feels that he worked really hard to get here and doesn’t feel that he got any help so he doesn’t feel he should give back to the community at large. Granted, we didn’t travel the exact same path but it’s hard for me to fathom overlooking the small kindnesses of strangers, like the support from a guidance counselor or a colleague who lobbied for your job security. These are the kinds of things that, though small, add up. They make a difference.
Pat Rothfuss, one of my favorite writers and a stand-up kind of guy, explained it far better than I managed that day:
The simple truth is, Jason, at this point in my life, I have enough money to live comfortably. And in my opinion, if you have enough money to live comfortably and you keep trying to get more and more and more money… well… it’s kind of an asshole thing to do.
It’s like this: if you have one piece of cake, and you eat it, that’s fine.
If you have two pieces of cake, you should probably share some with a friend. But maybe not. Occasionally we could all use two pieces of cake.
But if you have a whole cake, and you eat *all* of it, that’s not very cool. It’s not just selfish, it’s kinda sick and unhealthy.
[…]
That’s why I do all the charity work. Because the world isn’t as good as I want it to be.
I don’t have a better explanation than that for why I felt compelled to help those who have less. “The world isn’t as good as I want it to be”, so, let’s do something about that.
I don’t belong to the “have too many cakes” camp, particularly since I still support two adult dependents who aren’t my children, but while I aim to become that kind of wealthy someday, I don’t need to be that wealthy to want to make a difference. I can’t save any one person but sometimes a helping hand is all you need, sometimes it gives you enough hope to scrape yourself off the floor and keep going.
And that’s why I still give. Even though I’m all about personal responsibility and bootstrapping, I remember when a kind gesture was enough to help me do another job, fight another day.
PiC and I get an annual spending allowance out of our shared budget. This is purely for us to spend, however we want, that has nothing to do with necessities which are covered. It’s not much, but it’s not little either.
I usually hoard mine (SMAAUUGGGG) but this year, I’m making a conscious effort to give between 10-20% to meaningful charities.
Pat Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders was one: This was a massive fundraising drive to donate to Heifer International. They do good work, without much waste, and helping people make their own livelihood resonates with me.
Nathan Fillion and his Clean Water campaign for his birthday is another. I love my Captain and I love clean water for people. I remember, growing up, hearing the stories of how the people in our villages had to carry their water, in buckets, up from the streams. Backbreaking work for survival.
Last, and most dear to my heart, the Humane Society & Rescue Organization where we adopted Doggle. Rescuing animals: FTW!
Also, as always, I’ll be collecting things that are in good shape but we really don’t need anymore and donating them to charity that can use them: homeless and battered women/children’s shelters.
Which side of the fence do you stand on? What are your thoughts on the subject?
If you liked this post and found value in it, I’d appreciate your pin and shares.
March 6, 2014
Yes, we’re American but stag & hen is just easier to say. 🙂
I was just being grateful that at my age, most of my friends have gone past needing some ridiculous pre-wedding party, with a few exceptions (notably, a recent invitation that I declined that was composed of an overnight stay, bookended by multiple expensive activities).
But no, I was wrong. Gone are the days of having a group of friends get together for a relatively inexpensive spa day, or night off drinks and dancing or whatever it is we did back in the day as broke college grads. Now we’re seeing people ask their friends to fly across country, or meet up at a destination city, there to party it up for a full weekend. Between gifts, time-off, lodgings, travel arrangements, most of these seem to be $1000 minimum.
My physical therapist was just telling me about the great deal her boyfriend got, going to Mexico for “just $1000” for his friend’s stag party! *blink*
“All inclusive” is nice but $1000 for a weekend party with the boys (or girls) is a deal? When did that become the norm?
It almost feels like I woke up one day and our friends all became “wealthy” without us. To be fair, PiC’s friends are actually truly well-off, so it’s really not terribly surprising that a few thousand here and there isn’t cause for pause for them.
I don’t have any philosophical issues with destination weddings: that’s where the couple wants to go? Fine. And invitees are free to go, or not go, according to their time and budget constraints.
But stag and hen parties? They feel a little more like hostage negotiation when you’re part of the wedding party and the relevant betrothed is asking: so, what do you think of going to [insert international destination, during high season]? Y’all, when you need a passport for the pre-wedding party, I have objections.
We’ll have honest conversations with the friends, of course, because we’re simply not lining up to spend a few thousand dollars between the stag party, gifts and travel to the wedding; it’s not their fault but let’s face it, every wedding we attend requires travel these days.
There just aren’t that many people that we can spend that kind of money on, especially not with a friend getting married every year or two and oh, living our lives?
I’ve organized my fair share of these, there was the memorable year I ‘maided for 4 brides in 1 summer, but this remains too rich for my blood. Neither PiC or I got either stag/hen parties and I didn’t get a bridal shower, and our budget’s pretty happy about that.
How do you feel about these things? Fun and worth doing as a “once in a lifetime”? Or does it make you want to call for a simpler life? Or somewhere in between?
March 5, 2014
The last time I made a chili, it was turkey chili and an unmitigated disaster. Five years later, I’m ready to get back on that horse and modified a Michael Symon pork recipe. Five bowls later? SUCCESS.
Ingredients
1 tablespoon chili pepper
1 tablespoon sweet smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2.5 pounds pork, small cubes
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound slab bacon, cut into ½-inch dice
1 onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 jalapeno chilies, seeded and very finely chopped
2 red bell peppers, cored, seeded and finely diced
1 12 ounce bottle amber ale or porter
2 cups Chicken Stock
28-ounces canned diced tomatoes with juice
1 can tomato paste
Garnishes:
Shredded cheddar cheese,
Sliced scallions, white and green parts,
Diced red onions
Directions
In a large bowl, combine the red chili, paprika and cumin and toss with the pork; season with salt and pepper.
In a large enameled cast-iron Dutch oven, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil over medium-high heat. Add half of the pork and cook, turning as needed, until browned on all sides, about 8 minutes. Transfer the pork to a plate. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil and brown the remaining pork. Transfer to the plate. Add the bacon to the pot and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until browned and slightly crisp, about 7 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, jalapenos and bell peppers and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened, about 5 minutes.
In the crockpot, combine the pork, any accumulated juices, vegetables, ale, chicken stock, tomato paste, and tomatoes and set to low heat for 2.5 hours.
If the chili is more watery than you prefer, mix a tablespoon of flour with some of the chili juices in a separate bowl until it’s smooth, and add to the chili.
Notes
The original recipe was all stovetop but I needed the greater capacity of the crockpot. Our Dutch oven is too small!
And next time, I’ll try adding some ground pork, either substituting 1/3 of the regular pork cubes or just adding it to the pork cubes. I bet that would reduce the need for thickening.
Cost: Reasonable
10 servings for approximately $10.
I used the 2-lb chunk of pork shoulder I’d frozen from the last sale at $1.49/lb. Whenever we go to the Asian market, I try and pick up some bulk meat at a reasonable price for experiments like this. If they didn’t turn out, I didn’t waste too much money which would tick me off.
Other staples:
Canned tomatoes, Target price is $1/can or less. Bacon, the regular stuff is cheapest from Costco. I crave the amazing Zingermann’s applewood smoked bacon but it’s basically like drugs: we can’t afford a Zingerman’s lifestyle. But it’s soooo good.
Vegetables, from the produce market any combination of 5-lbs of produce tends to average $0.75/lb. It’s awesome.
Chicken stock, homemade. Delicious.
Spices, we have these on hand but good grief, they’re expensive on refill.
February 24, 2014
One of the few perks of my current job was one that sounds good, but that I was pretty skeptical about. Unlimited vacation!
SURE… sounds great but I didn’t really like it because as a certified workaholic, when would I take that time off? It didn’t seem very likely.
A small part of me, the part that’s still insecure about stupid stuff like looking lazy for taking time off, wanted to insist on having 3 weeks totally off guaranteed instead of this weird yawning abyss of “unlimited” stuff. Probably so that I wouldn’t feel guilty for choosing to take time off. And what is that about? Is it the ingrained need to have “budgets” for everything? That sounds irrational but think about it: if you don’t have set accepted norms, then socially speaking, there’s a compulsion to follow the crowd. If the crowd doesn’t take a week off, then you don’t take a week off.
Long term and from an objective perspective, with an unlimited days off policy, you wouldn’t get paid out at the end of your employment period for unused days. While I never relied on that, I always felt like that was a bit of a bonus for me since I could never really take my vacations anyway. At the end of one job, I took home a check for more than 300 unused vacation hours. That was delicious.
Over a year later, I’m now curious whether my skepticism’s panned out, so I decided to do an informal collection of data.
I went through our timeoff log, and took down the number of days that people logged as holidays, days off, or travel days (just semantics). I didn’t take down everyone’s time, just a representative cross section.
Counted:
1. Days off that span weekends since we all work weekends regularly enough that we often notify each other when we AREN’T going to be available on the weekend. For example, if we were marked off from Monday through Sunday, that’s 6 days.
2. Federal holidays, same reason as above.
3. Days working from a place that’s not home or the office on the assumption that in a traditional office, you’d have to take that time off entirely.
Not counted:
Work from home days because location only matters to some of us and it’s not considered a free day.
An important detail: we all tend to be available during our holiday time anyway. If we’re totally offline, it’s not for more than a couple of days, we just reduce our online hours during “vacation”.
Given that we’re all, voluntarily, only partly off during these holidays, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Or a peck. But it is still really impressive to see that we are, in fact, really using our flexibility.
There are few reasons I think this works really well.
1. We’re all responsible adults. No one has to be nagged for anything, though some people will nag because it’s in their nature to do so 😉
2. We recognize where our work intersects with or affects other people and we respect each other enough to take care of that work in a timely manner.
3. Most of us either had exceptionally strong, pre-existing working relationships with each other, or are really easygoing and don’t waste time on taking offense, taking things personally, or really, doing anything but getting the job done. This makes for an amazing work environment: no politics, very few arguments, even fewer meetings.
4. We’re still a small enough group that we simply don’t have the luxury of being or having deadweight.
I’m a convert and didn’t even know it ….
DANG.
Granted, this could be because I made a pact to be open to taking time away. But topping the time off chart was totally unexpected.
I’ll be interested to see whether my numbers change when I can take the time off entirely, with full backup, because then that might start feeling excessive. Doing the math: When you boil it down, I probably work at 20-40% capacity while on vacation, so that works out to being “off” … 36.9 days. Honestly? The way I work, I don’t think that’s at all excessive.
So two months “off”? I don’t even feel guilty. When I’m on, I’m ON. Sixteen hours a day on, if necessary, no complaints very little complaint. And when I’m off, well, until I have sufficient back up, I’m doing double duty working and vacationing at the same time. I prioritize and occasionally drop the non-critical stuff but I always, always get the job done.
I’m proud of myself for actually using the flexibility to be more present in our family lives, to do things we’ve never done before .
And you know what? This is the sort of thing that our work culture encourages. Get the job done, and do whatever you want otherwise: don’t be so stereotypically American that we only work hard and never play. In addition to all the above variables, no one really cares about when or how much time someone else is taking off because we make sure to cover the work and each other, and that’s really what matters at the end of the day: getting the job done reasonably well, efficiently, and on time.
For all the other life-things that are difficult, in this, I’m a lucky woman.
As far as our budget goes, I can’t say this is a GOOD thing, our travel budget in 2013 was astronomical! But we won’t be doing that much travel all the time. 🙂
:: This is, bar none, the most generous and flexible policy I’ve ever encountered, in writing and in practice during my working years. Have you had better? How do you prefer your vacation days?
:: Bonus: What’s your dream vacation?
February 20, 2014
It’s 3 am.
Doggle’s migrated yet again out of his crate, he has a nightly rotation with more cycles in and out of the thing the later I keep him up with my confounded lights and electronics, sleep growling and barking like, in his dreams, he’s a real, fully fledged dog. (I warrant you he is not. He’s a dog-cat-camel.)
I finally stopped working at midnight tonight, leaving half a pile of things undone because I was just too tired to keep going. It’s an early night, so of course my mind and body conspire to keep me awake. Having dutifully re-read Elizabeth Moon’s Once A Hero to ready my eyes for sleep and clear my head, I turned in only to discover my mind was just waiting to race with all the other things still undone.
It’s been a rough several weeks, feels like months, since things at work kinda went smash.
Every work day, and every day is a work day, has spanned two days. Starting mid-morning, I’ve worked straight through to 2 am, til at the end of each week I’m only pretty sure I know what names are but I couldn’t properly use one. The dog has been patiently waiting for me to come to bed most nights, even disregarding the fact that his precious master had long since stumbled off to bed first. Canine pity. You know it’s bad when that kicks in.
It was just last year I was saying that I couldn’t do business school or a graduate program; I don’t have the energy to repeat the feats of my 20s, working round the clock, stumbling out of bed at six or seven am and falling back into it after 1 or 2 am. Granted, I’m eking out a few hours more this time around but, unshrouded by the invincibility of youth, it feels a whole lot worse!
This will pass, not soon enough for me, but I will survive. Thanks to a husband who does his share around the house and in the kitchen when he comes home to a cold and semi-lighted home, his spouse glued to the computer, we still get fed on the really rough days and don’t worry too much about the other details til we can.
In the meantime, I can lay here and mull over those follies of youth, presumably the price you pay for having the kind of energy that we old ‘uns can only remember fondly.
Why I’d never want to be 19 again….
When I bought my first car, I knew enough to dicker for it, but not enough to avoid the usual moneymaking dodges like GAP insurance or being heavily overcharged for insurance on my own policy. The best part, though, the moment I realized that maybe I was in over my head and shouldn’t have done everything on my own, was the moment of taking ownership. I slid into the new seat, shut the new door, buckled the new seatbelt, turned to roll down the windows and gasped to my best friend in the passenger seat, horrified: where are the window controls?!?
For a long panicked moment, we both thought I’d managed to buy a car with no window controls at all, let alone power.
Of course I hadn’t. But that sheer lack of experience and knowledge at that age crystallized for me in that moment.
I like to pretend I made up for these shame by paying the car off in 3 years instead of 5 but I think we all know that’s not true.
At 19 I was faced with a sick mother and a bedridden grandparent, a partially employed father, an idiotic older sibling spending money like it came with an expiration date, newly dating a boy who’d never love me til I left him (and then couldn’t scrape him off my boots for two years as he tried to show the dedication he couldn’t muster in the same amount of time we dated), still morally and absolutely certain that if I just worked hard enough it would all come out in the end. Because that’s totally how the world works.
Sure, something came out of something’s rear end but I can assure you it wasn’t my happy resolution with a bow on top. But you probably couldn’t have told me that in any words that I’d believe back then.
Ahh youth. Blindly optimistic youth. I would never go back. Not for all the lovely lovely energy that came with it.
There are a dozen more stories of inexperience and stupidity I could share but in the spirit of generosity, how about y’all share instead? (she said, cajolingly) Would you ever go back?
February 18, 2014
I’ve mentioned before, we’re not your normal romantic people so the usual sentiments aren’t really my bag. I can’t remember when we actually chose to “celebrate” Valentine’s Day, probably back in the early dawn of our dating days, when he still brought me flowers every month. Ever so sentimental, I enjoyed this for a while but then asked him to save his money. 🙂
Nowadays, we’ve been happiest spending the night in with a
good movie, good Dog, good food, and good pajamas.
This year, inasmuch as I was looking forward to anything, I was anticipating a quiet weekend, logging lots of work hours, maybe trying a new recipe or two. Oh and updating our Net Worth – excitement! But none of that happened.
Instead, PiC had something come up and rather than send him on a trip alone, in the dark, overnight, I decided I’d just go with him and work from the road. Couldn’t tell you why I had a problem with his riding the night bus (which always makes me think of the Harry Potter Knight Bus) really, but I did.
So we hit the road together, with an extra excited Dog, for a short weekend of errands. That night, we shared take out from In’n’Out, and hung out in a hotel room watching tv (hm), working (me), and guarding (Dog).
Budget Bonus: We found a hotel overnight stay special for less than $100, and redeemed a free night’s stay at another hotel so our lodgings cost just about $100 for the whole weekend. We managed to stay way from blowing big bucks on meals out, just having modest dinners that ran about $20 per night and had free breakfast at the hotel. +5 for not blowing a big chunk of our travel budget for an unplanned trip.
Oh, also, he got me two roses, one from each of the boys, and donuts. Because love tastes like donuts.
Sometimes home really is where the heart is. Other times, it’s just where you hide out from the rest of the increasingly annoying world. 😉
P.S. Geeky love songs are the best. I grew up on cheesy 80s power ballads and believe me, I recognize their ultimate cheesiness even as I enjoy them, but when someone makes the effort to take inspiration from something I enjoy in the geek world and renders melodic magic from it, well, that’s entirely something else.
Cover of Sam Hart’s Mario Kart Love Song by adrisaurus
Original: Sam Hart’s Mario Kart Love Song
February 11, 2014
Once in a blue moon’s blue moon, we have a perfect weekend. It takes all kinds of variables coming together, half of which are rare birds: lovely weather, good friends, delicious (and affordable!) food, time and most of all, energy. This was one of them.
I kicked myself for forgetting to use a 2 for 1 tasting coupon but otherwise the weekend was amazing.
We haven’t been to Napa in more than 5 years, despite being just a relatively reasonable drive away, so we relied on the advice of friends and a fair amount of research. I always forget that it’s not a 2.5 hour drive, more like 1.5 which is nothing by LA standards. By SF standards, it feels like a half day commitment.
Our friends who said that no one should cram more than 2 vineyards into a visit really knew what they were talking about. Taking your time, packing a delicious charcuterie picnic lunch, and moseying from Vineyard 1 to Vineyard 2, and relaxing at each is really the best recipe.
There’s truly something to be said for exploring your own backyard!
:: What’s a local attraction you’ve enjoyed? Close to your home, I mean.
