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 MoreJanuary 3, 2025
1. I’ve made one small dent in each of the three messes: my office, JB’s room, and Smol Acrobat’s room. Work in progress.
Challenges this week: we need to figure out our home and auto insurance. They are EXPENSIVE.
Not good: net neutrality was struck down by the federal court. (I mistyped feral and honestly, how wrong is that, really?) Watching Celeste Pewter for more news.
January 1, 2025
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $501.10 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
We banked $260 in gift cards for participating in a big study. That covers a lot of household essentials.
December 30, 2024
Year 5, Day 250: Spiral cut ham is amazing and makes for some amazing leftovers-lunches. Who knew? If I had a deep freezer (one of my “if we could manage and afford a bigger house” sorts of dreams), I would have hams in there at all times. Dreams.
Also, and this is probably not news but, I cannot be trusted to go to Costco alone. If I’m not getting myself lost (which is most of the time), then I’m picking up that ten pound bag of pancake mix because it’s $4 for 2 lbs elsewhere but only $10 for 10 lbs here! FOOL. What 4 person family needs 10 lbs of pancake mix?? We do not have pancakes that often. I plead holiday / end of year brain. I guess we will have to have them that often to get through this.
Woof. Mostly unrelated: I’m logging our credit card bills due in January and they are double the normal budget. Lots of one-off expenses that added up so fast. I think we can cover it through cashflow but it’ll be a bit tight for a while. Also daycare’s price increase hits THIS month, I forgot. $2400. A month. 😭
I solved the toe blister mystery: I’d worn my cotton socks for a couple days and my precious toes hated them so much they all developed blisters. As soon as my wool socks came back on, they healed up.
Year 5, Day 251: It’s a four KitKat kind of day. It’s cold and dreary out. There’s very little growing in the garden. There is no furry-feet family member to greet me at the door when I get back from a loooong morning of running errands. Or to be snoring and then looking at me through bleary eyes as I tiptoe back in trying not to disturb them. Harrumph.
Speaking of Costco fails: We found Boudin clam chowder in the refrigerator section. I didn’t expect it to be as good as the restaurant when I bought it but then we (uncharacteristically) wandered through an area with a Boudin, had their clam chowder, and now the Costco version tastes flat (to me). I bet it would have been just fine if we hadn’t had some that was better. Taste bud inflation is terrible. PiC likes it well enough but that just goes to show you how easy he is to feed with my less than stellar cooking.
BUT. I put in a big order of snacks for my Lakota sponsee and staple foods for their family. I squared away raises for all of my people before the last days of the year trickled away. Those are the good things.
Year 5, Day 252: I’m doing big time grey rocking with certain people this holiday. I’m doing a good job! I’m not intensely irritated, I am simply a person floating out of time.
Wait no, I am irritated. By all this talk about trying to revoke the FDA approval for the polio vaccine. I can’t tell if they’re seriously this reckless and horrible (yes) or if it’s primarily intended to drum up panic among those of us who have an iota of sense and being reckless and horrible is just a bonus. I don’t know if he was the LAST American (as purported on Bluesky) to have used an iron lung and died, but this just makes me shake my head all over again about how utterly awful these people are: Paul Alexander, forced into an iron lung by polio in 1952, dies at 78
Year 5, Day 253: Do you like shinies? I keep saying that I don’t need any more earrings, but I love them so. Turns out Kythryne Aisling’s shop (I found her on Bsky) has a selection of perfect earrings to fill a specific genre of earrings that has been missing from my collection: small, dangly and tough so I can wear them all the time without discomfort or damaging them. I’d been going through these silly cycles of wearing earrings for some special thing or another and then leaving them off so long the holes would partially close up again (as they always do between earrings) because my preferred earring styles are too fragile to endure me being me. I got myself the elephants, the forbidden candy (they look like jolly ranchers!), fauxfire twisties, and kitsune. As a kid I always envied people who could wear all kinds of earrings. My metal allergies limited me to a very few pairs that wouldn’t cause infections. But now, if I never let them close up, I can wear anything I want! This is an unexpectedly fun jewelery era for me. Also Kythryne has very cute dogs and I appreciate the dog pictures on the skyline.
My sinuses are making their presence Very Known right now and I hate it. They’re angry. My heart rate keeps doing weird things late at night so I can’t get even the minimal rest I normally manage, I keep laying awake later and later.
Year 5, Day 254: A black lab encounter: Neighborhood dog came over for love, of course I obliged, and then wouldn’t leave. He kept looking at Smol Acrobat and PiC with “but you haven’t petted me yet? I cannot leave?” eyes. I gave him extra pets to make up for the fact that they couldn’t come pet him.
Saying this really quietly here so as not to jinx myself: shipping issues have plagued the dozens of shipments for the Lakota families so I was expecting the same for all my orders this month: books, clothes, prescription refills.
Also a nice surprise: a sale of a very old swimsuit (still in remarkably good condition) on Poshmark! I never open the app anymore, I just leave my listings up and occasionally it bears some fruit. In this case, $13 eventually. I also followed up on that money side quest from the Swiss government. Two weeks and that lady had done nothing with the revised information to send the bank transfer. She didn’t even start processing it right away when I followed up. “In a few days” she’ll start it. Cough up our money! They should be required to pay interest on money they’ve held onto for too long like the US government has to when they refund us.
I’ve hit the point in the holiday season grind where three out of four of us are sick. I’m just dragging myself through each day with gritted teeth. Not my favorite but also not super surprised. Everything is topsy turvy this year, our relaxing family time was swapped to the new year and that’s now in question because they are sick.
December 27, 2024
1. We went on a walk and were accosted by two grey tabbies that DEMANDED petting. Naturally, we obliged.
Challenges this week: Too much peopling this week.
December 23, 2024
Year 5, Day 243: For many reasons I feel zero holiday cheer so far. PiC got the tree up, and it’s nice to see the shiny sparkly but I’m just not feeling it. Busy-ness is definitely a factor. Everything (in the world) also feels so much harder than it needs to be. Every day with the kids is a whole lot of struggle. On the plus side, I’m not feeling the deep-seated anxiety that I usually feel around family stuff this time of year. Am I just too tired to? Maybe! But also I noticed that working through things in therapy and I am no longer feeling the anxiety-driven need to pack for these things six months out.
Lack of anxiety – good, lack of energy driven by the anxiety – less good.
It was another struggle today with brain fog and a storm passing through at the same time. Work was much tougher than it should have been.
But lots of packages arrived today! They were the key ones: books and treats I have to pack up by Wednesday for distribution. Whew. I was sweating the books package the most but a few other things were also important.
I hate this for Cloud @ Wandering Scientist. Her daughter caught whooping cough at school and now Cloud is sick too which ruins her plans to shop for presents in person. This reminds me of how much of my life is centered around doing most things 1-2 months in advance because odds are high that I’ll get sick, overwhelmed, or fatigued, or all of the above if I leave important things until near the day of.
Year 5, Day 244: Joe Udo at Retire by 40 has been retired for 12 years already! That really flew by. In his housekeeping post, he said: For 2024, the Roth IRA contribution limit is $7,000 for those under 50. If you’re over 50 like me, you can contribute up to $8,000. The Roth IRA is the best retirement account because you don’t have to pay tax when you withdraw from the account. Everyone should max out their Roth IRA every year. If you haven’t maxed out your contribution yet, now is a great time to do it. Actually, the deadline for 2024 is April 15th. But I like to contribute in the same calendar year to keep it simple.
I don’t have any such advice. I had to max out a 401K this year, and we haven’t contributed to our Roth IRAs for a few years. I stopped contributing to the traditional IRA as well since I wasn’t getting a tax benefit from it and didn’t want to be constrained by RMDs in all our accounts.
I threw together our New Year cards and ordered them today. It’s too late to get them in the mail before I’m steamrolled by the holidays, but that doesn’t matter! Because they’re New Year cards and can go out in January! Go me, planning ahead for potential failures for once. And buying them at 60% off for a custom design at Office Depot made them much more affordable. Updates to farflung family and friends are nice, better when it doesn’t cost $200+. Plenty of people use Minted and other fancier services but it just doesn’t rank that high in my spending plans. I have to conserve our dollars for direct aid to folks (Larime, Linda Tirado) and others.
Year 5, Day 245: Smol Acrobat has been wandering about like a cranky old fogey grumping out of the blue, “but I wanted sushi!” every few days. They never tell us they want sushi at any point where it would have done any good, mind you, they’re just rolling up with a grievance while we’re putting together dinner as if we’d taken a poll and rejected their ask. Strong reaction from the kid who only eats cucumber rolls! I should give them a bowl of slivered cucumber on rice with a side of nori and see if that solves the problem.
Year 5, Day 246: I was reviewing Smol Acrobat’s doctor’s visit notes to find their height, I’m trying to get their Global Entry applications ready, and was very pleased to see that the doc recorded my request for a 6 month booster of the COVID vaccine next spring and approved it. I appreciate it when people listen to me and do what’s necessary without having to be told twice!
The GE application process is a total pain right now though. I had to change a detail for JB but I can’t do it myself, I need them to. Six emails in, they’re still insisting they changed it already and I’m sending screenshots of how they changed it (incorrectly) in one place but not the other place so I still can’t move forward. My “thanks for any help you can provide” is getting more and more sarcastic with every repetition.
My nightmares are back even though I’m still taking the prazosin. They’re not as intense as they used to be, yet, but still decidedly impactful. I usually remember the dreaming when I wake up pretty clearly but this one lingered all day: we were in small boats crossing oceans and meeting people we sort of knew in some faraway unknown places. I suspect it came from a pondering on the diaspora of boat people from Vietnam and how my cousins 20 years older than me lived that and remember it clearly.
Year 5, Day 247: Our car insurance went up 18% in the summer, and I just got the notification that it’s gone up again another 15%. What the hell??
Also annoying: I have blisters or blister type pain on almost all my toes today. The tops, sides and bottoms, variably. What did I do wrong now?? I asked each toe individually, why are you suddenly such a bad neighbor? I gleaned zero satisfactory information from this interrogation.
Searching the internets, specifically Mayo Clinic since general Googling is useless these days, didn’t turn up anything super useful but it did teach me about Bullous pemphigoid. Things could be much worse, is what they’re telling me. Still, having pretty much all toes hurt isn’t great.
December 20, 2024
1. I FINALLY tackled 2/3 of the wall boxes! You know the boxes that get piled against a wall “for now” that then grow into mountains as people stack things on top of those boxes “for a minute” and eventually there is no hope of reclaiming that space? I’ve reclaimed 2/3 of it! That last third, or quarter, of the pile remains, slightly mocking me, but that’s still progress.
Can we help this young man? Elijah Romero metastatic cancer
December 18, 2024
I am continually amazed by how fast they make friends. It turns out that it’s also hard for them when they have conflict because when they make a friend, they want to KEEP the friends.
Large and deep sigh. Parenting this age is feeling really hard right now. I can’t tell how much is it being complicated and hard versus how to tell how much of this is our own failings as humans and parents versus how much is that it’s just hard to deal with younger humans whose brains are still developing and whose emotions are still all over the place and big and loud. Some people don’t find kids confusing and difficult and those people are not me. I know I’m trying my best, we both are, but sometimes our best is really not good. It’s hard not to have a right answer to every situation. It’s hard not to feel like it is so damn messy and that we’re making mistakes that will require intensive therapy later. Maybe my parenting suffers when I don’t have a dog, because dogs are my refuge and I have no refuge in those hard moments when I want to scream and/or tear my hair out because the kids are being totally irrational and nothing I can say makes things ok or better or make sense.
Smol Acrobat loves their electric toothbrush.
They also love tacking on “pants on fire” to literally any phrase they might be saying at the time. Guess what chicken butt PANTS ON FIRE!
They’re a completely grumpy noodle when they wake up most mornings now, any excuse to pick a fight and grouch. Which is super awesome when combined with the grumpy noodle that is their sibling. I think this is related to their inability to nap at daycare anymore – they’re not getting enough sleep. Usually when they get an afternoon nap in, they’re good for a 630 am wakeup. Not that we WANT that, 7 is more civilized, but they’re groggy and overtired even at 715 or 730 on weekdays after not napping. We make sure they can nap on the weekends, and, boy do they, but we can’t do anything about the weekdays. Unlike JB who dropped their nap at 3 years old, this one still really needs that sleep. And naturally, now that we need them up early, JB is also not sleeping enough even with an early bedtime so they’re always tired in the morning. Two grumpy noodles is two too many.
We still aren’t adopting yet. We had Cousin Dog over for a week and he’s so easy and my heart was so happy to have him here. But he’s easy. My friends are remaining me daily that we’re still on Team Not Yet with all the stories of their dogs and shenanigans: one is eating all the non food she can get her jaws around, including their fence and their walls. One is having a tantrum about going out for walks. One is not allowing Mom to go home yet because she has to walk walk walk walk play!! then run then walk.
I laugh a little and remember Ahhhh, right. We don’t have time for that yet.
SmolAc: da wadder is too cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold
*Turn up heat* how about now?
SmolAc: still cold AUGH TOO HOT TOO HOT I DIDN AH-SPECT DAT
🤦🏻♀️
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JB: I heard the teachers saying that she could spend some amount of money and get a free turkey at Safeway…… It was like $200. I guess that’s a lot.
Me: Why is that coming up now? It’s 10 pm.
JB: I heard you say turkey.
Me: Nooo… I said I was trying to order COVID tests.
JB: Oh, I heard COVID turkey.
Me: Gross.
*****
SmolAc: I got DIS ONE. *waves a rock around*
JB: that’s a pumice! (Pronounced it poo-mus)
SmolAc: poo??? EWWWWW
Me: Puh-mice, y’all.
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Smol Acrobat’s aphorism: if it works, great. If it not works, not great.
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Smol Acrobat got mad at me one morning because I picked clothes for them. They wanted a different shirt and asked if they could wear that one instead. I told them that was fine, just go hang up the other one I set out. “But YOU unhanged it!”
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