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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October 13, 2010
Let’s start with the ugly-money, shall we? Transportation
PiC paid a little over $400 for each of our tickets. *urk*
Other costs: $66 for shuttles, $107 for taxis. *urrkkk*
* The cabs were because we chose not to destroy me trying to walk 3+ miles round trip to and from our various destinations. He could have done it easily, but I would have been wrecked. The subway and buses didn’t really service the areas and times we needed, unfortunately.
Lodgings
Our hotel for a two-night stay and with an extra hour late checkout (requested at the last minute when I realized PiC wasn’t going to make it back from the marathon in time: Free (thanks to points redemption)
Food
Friday was our travel day and we subsisted on travel snacks we packed, plane snacks and then had a dinner covered by his gift card, tip not included: $68/$11 out of pocket.
Saturday – we had a free breakfast provided by the hotel (PiC had two), and a really late lunch that basically became dinner from 3:00 to 4:30 pm. Again, covered by the gift card: $92/$10 out of pocket. Yes, tip was far less because service was absolutely awful that day. Food was still good, but the server was terrible.
Sunday – it was free breakfast again separately and a nice lunch outdoors together after the race: $33/$6 tip.
Entertainment
We walked the park everyday, watched tv in the evenings while stretching and recovering from the very long walks, and to rest up for the race, there was a big ole country music festival going on in Millenium Park all weekend: all free (minus the cabs to get us the rest of the way to the convention center). All free.
Mini Photo Gallery
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| We’re in love with this heirloom tomato salad accompanied by burrata cheese, smoked sea salt & aged balsamic vinegar. |
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| Mediterranean octopus … something. It was good. |
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| Best sea scallop appetizer I’ve had in years. Perfectly cooked! |
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| Marathon food: Walleye pike on kale. |
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| Not Marathon Food: Turkey burger and a thousand french fries. |
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| Also Not Marathon Food: asparagus and caramelized onion pizza. |
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| Tagliatelle! |
Signs that made me laugh
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| What you can’t read at the top: Hot Asian Buns. *snicker* |
Sightseeing
October 12, 2010
For the longest time, I’ve been converted to a wholly electronic tracking system for all my transactions and cashflow monitoring. It seemed to be the best option for my highly mobile life, but of late, I’ve neglected the Excel sheets so shamefully that I have whole two-week chunks missing from my financial life.
In terms of my spending, that’s bad enough, but as payments due to me slow to a crawl, they’re likely to be forgotten and fall off the radar. We can’t have that happening now!
I’ve dusted off the trusty old notebook and started scrawling notes of every transaction for which I expect payment so that I can follow up again. And again. And again.
[Yes, this was in part motivated by the horrified fascination of watching money flow out on recent travels.]
I often find that I revert to pen and paper is like the mac and cheese of my finances, the favorite blanky a kid snuggles in. It’s comforting stuff, pen and paper financials.
October 10, 2010
Did you guys see that incredible sprint to the finish? That’s absolutely crazy. This year’s winner crossed the finish this year in two hours and six minutes and some odd seconds.
PiC and I have spent the last two days wandering Millenium Park and generally trying to take in as much of the city as possible while not overtaxing his pre-marathon legs, or breaking my non-marathonable legs.
It’s been positively gorgeous here, probably closer to 75 degrees with a light breeze. At least seven brides lucked out as well, sashaying through the park with their bridal parties of 12 or more, taking photos near the Bean, on the steps, amid the crowd of spectators in town for the marathon, for the country music festival or just out and about because the sun had re-emerged.
I thought we managed a nice balance between our two wildly different levels of fitness, considering he had to keep it very mellow and I pushed myself to walk between 3 to 5 miles per day in my quest to enjoy downtown and spend less on cabs.
We should have used more public transport to keep costs down, but we didn’t plan carefully enough to take that into account and were focused on staying in the lovely weather while it lasted. We’re definitely paying through the nose to enjoy that luxury. (In retrospect, all that walking was also foolish, I ache.)
Anyhow, we’ve got a few more hours in the Windy City before our shuttle picks us up. Pictures and a cost round up when we’re back home!
October 6, 2010
I was reading an article that makes the point that your raises depend on making specific kinds of contributions to an organization.
Sara suggests that there are five categories of people who make themselves seem indispensable to a company, and therefore more valuable: The Learners, The Pushers, The Changers, The Builders, and The Teamers.
The Learners gather and store institutional knowledge; the Pushers are results-driven; the Changers are problem identifiers and troubleshooters, tinkerers; the Builders are visionaries who can do everything to launch a new project; and the Teamers are consensus builders.
Offhand, I can clearly identify at least one key management individual who happens to be highly capable in each of the above areas, except for Learning. I think that the value of institutional knowledge in some organizations will vary. For myself, I think I’m still naive, green or young enough to think that I can be strong in all those areas. It may just be phasic, though.
Several years ago, I was definitely a Learner. Now I’m cycling through the other four sorts of skills, nearly on a daily basis, depending on the project and I wonder if it wouldn’t be more valuable to focus on one or two skills. Is this similar to multi-tasking, am I just diluting my ability to be effective because the brain can really only manage one task at a time? Or is it a case where the more skills the better?
Do you see any of these traits in yourself? Do you think that growing any of these abilities or tendencies would benefit you in your current organization or your future plans?
October 3, 2010
This entire month has been so busy as to be unreal, so it stands to reason that I’m having trouble believing the net worth is real.
Every single weekend was booked: hosting friends, driving back to LA, traveling to Oregon, hosting half a dozen houseguests for days. Every weekday was booked: I started an intensive pain care program, had a birthday, and worked every weekday.
The numbers aren’t fudged, but I have felt a poor steward of my money for not quite knowing where every penny is or has gone. The last notation on my cashflow Excel sheet is September 15th, for heaven’s sake; it doesn’t make sense that it’s gone up without close shepherding. In any case, a fraction was thanks to automated savings and contributions, the rest is due to the vagaries of the market and interest payments. Next month, the phrase “keeping bills as low as possible” will be an honest factor in that. We’ve been feeding about ten extra mouths this month, I’d just be lying.
To kill that feeling of unsteadiness, I paid all my bills a few days ago, took a deep breath and I’m doing some therapeutic cleaning today to clear my head and make a fresh start. Let’s take on October!
September 27, 2010
As requested by Stacking Pennies when I first mentioned flying Allegiant, my opinion now that I’ve flown my entire round trip: You get what you pay for, but only if you pay very little.
Pay more than $30 each way and you will probably be livid at what you overpaid for.
The MD-80s are creaky, ancient jobs that more often than not spill water on people towards the back (polled frequent fliers: this is true in their experience); the engines are so loud that you might suffer temporary hearing loss if you’re seated too close to them; they charge for everything like the right to choose your seat, even the “standard” free beverage so don’t expect a free glass of water, you cannot check in beforehand, if you miss your flight you have to wait a week for the next one or buy a new ticket on another airline.
It’s as barebones as you can imagine. More. I don’t know if you’re charged to use the lavatory but I’ve started to expect so.
So yes, if you snagged one of those magic $10 tickets, you should put up with all of that without complaint but if you ended up paying nearly standard fare before opting for any amenities, I can only imagine you’d be a tad grumpy. *hand raised* Other than that, we saved the cost of a rental, though marginally offset by the cost of public transit going to and from the Oakland airport on this end, and maybe a few dollars more than that for a standard fare into a more metro city.
Still, it got us into the destination with a minimum of fuss for our hosts and given the fact that they put us up in, while not decadent, very well fed fashion, I’m glad it was very easy for them to pick and drop us off. So there’s that.
{————Carnivals————}
My thanks …..
to Well Heeled for hosting this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and including my post on the costs of PiC’s Marathon entry win.
September 21, 2010
It wasn’t
meant to be a vacation. I had, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to go on this trip with PiC out of a sense that I should go with him, because he really wanted me to come along. He would have been fine with or without me, really, but it was a nice idea and so it was penned into the planner as another chore of sorts to be gotten over with. And the beginnings were not, one would say, auspicious.
Behold the paper towels that did not hold back the flood overhead five minutes into my flight after a mind-numbing two hour delay and numerous other WTHeckeries that punctuated our transit out of California
After a nice settling in, the rest of the weekend was incredible. Restful, full of good food, good sleep, nice people, exploring, and good laughs.
It’s an incredibly runner friendly town we visited, and I felt like we were in the country though we honestly weren’t. We didn’t manage to hike because it rained most of the time, but we still managed a lovely 3 mile walk around a park and visited with the world’s wriggliest puppy, had hot chocolate and coffee at the Wandering Goat Coffee House, drinks at the local posh restaurant where they acknowledged their local foragers (apologies for the photo quality but it was just so cute):
By the by, my French 75 cocktail? Knocked me on my tail! I’m not much of a drinker to begin with, but 1/2 way through on an empty stomach, I realized, oh, I’m going to be that girl tonight. I like to pretend that I wasn’t, but I probably was.
While this wasn’t an inexpensive trip, it wasn’t too pricey either. We ate in most meals, with the exception of one lunch and one very nice dinner for four. PiC and I footed the bill for that dinner because we didn’t bring a hosting gift, and our host friends cooked simple but alarmingly* good food the rest of our visit.
My biggest disappointment was forgetting to take food pictures – everything was so fresh and delicious we immediately devoured it, every time.
Mini-Photo Gallery
The deer that earned me the moniker “Elmira”: Just because I dashed out the door yelling “I’m gonna pet the deer!” nearly before getting clothes on … And no, the deer didn’t wait around for me to pet them.
Gone walkies …. over a river
My first wild-blackberrying on the side of a road
Late bloomers
