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 More
July 21, 2023
1. My cough won’t budge but my pain has been lower than usual. I’ll take the win.
Helping folks: A dear friend who has helped me through therapy, mental health struggles, and more is in a really tough situation right now. She escaped an abusive parent / caretaking situation with a lot of help 2 years ago (old GFM here for reference). She was able to start over with a clean slate, but of course since then, her job has been steadily cutting her pay and her hours. She’s been actively job hunting, I’ve been helping, but things are rough out there and she’s not been able to find a safe landing pad. She didn’t want to ask for help, she didn’t actually ask me for help, but I know she needs it and I’ve been in that exact situation where I wasn’t sure it was worth continuing to fight, and been unwilling to ask for help myself. I won’t leave a friend like that.
Her current critical need is that her car needs work, estimated to cost $2000+, which she can’t afford with the steady drop in income. I’ve set aside a large chunk of cash for it, and am hoping friends will be able to help pitch in to help us get the rest of the way. You know I’d never ask for myself, but I will ask for a friend. We have $600 right now, so we’re almost halfway there. If you can, every bit would help so much.
Venmo: @RK-Tillman
PayPal: ruthtillman [at sign] gmail.com
Cashapp: $ruthkt
(more…)
July 18, 2023
JB and I were discussing spending habits and inclinations. I shared that I’m happiest when I preserve half of my spending budget. Even if that money was earmarked for spending specifically, I like coming home with half of it still in my pocket. Budget. Whichever.
They like to leave it all out on the field, so to speak.
It occurs to me that when I think of spending in retirement, I get nervous because it feels more constrained. It worries me to have a ceiling on what we can spend. But even if I didn’t set a ceiling on our spending, our incomes necessarily provide a ceiling. We don’t have a money tree to harvest when we’ve spent all available income. We have to stop spending sometime. Doesn’t matter if it’s an artificial or real ceiling that we’re choosing to stop at, we have to stop.
So what’s different about having a set budget in retirement?
Is it because artificial ceilings feel safer, knowing I COULD dig into the allocated savings if I want to? Or is it because we’d presumably be only spending and not saving in retirement, and the mode of “not saving” is only associated with bad memories because the only times I wasn’t saving in the past were for bad reasons?
Maybe it’s a spicy cornucopia of everything. But I should spend some time thinking about this and how to adjust my attitude a little over the coming years. I can’t be in Prepper (Chaos and Emergencies are Imminent!) mode for the rest of our lives.
Related to this:
Maggie tipped me to this podcast interview with Mindy and Carl of 1500Days. I mainly know Carl through his blog and mutual friends, Mindy has supported a number of my initiatives in the past. I know them but don’t know-know them.
There was a LOT of food for thought in that episode. It’s really interesting to hear how two people, one of whom retired early and the other of whom still earns money, view their money and their spending habits.
I had to laugh at how many habits we share, how many times I nodded in agreement with something Mindy or Carl said, even as I recognized our shared irrational fears. My need for control, and my fear of lack of control, have always played a huge role in how I handled our money and it’s a slow process in undoing those fears and worries.
Carl said: “My money hoarding tendencies were borne out of trauma and insecurity.” While this is still true for me, I am working on it.
Much like the issues I have with my dad, my deep-seated insecurities born from a childhood where people I trusted betrayed me repeatedly, I’m identifying where those issues drive fear responses and am slowly unraveling those tight reactionary cords twisted around my heart.
I don’t have half as much fear as I used to about money. We save a lot for the future and we also spend on huge ticket necessities like childcare, camp, my therapist, some extracurriculars, take out to make our lives easier, convenience foods also to make our lives easier. If we had lower incomes, I would have much higher anxiety and feel the need to spend less. Making more money absolutely enables me to relax more than ever before because I can save and spend on the income we have.
The x-factor for me feeling comfortable with spending and retiring, always, is the healthcare question. Our employer-sponsored healthcare plan is the next to cheapest one offered and it’s still excellent and it’s still very expensive. We pay about $4000 in premiums, annually. The employer pays $19,000! That’s $23,000 for a year of premiums. Granted, we have really excellent coverage.
We haven’t needed very extensive care, the worst has been my labor and delivery x 2, but my doctor orders labs and x-rays and other things as needed just to rule out more serious ailments whenever my body does the weird things that my body does. I’ve never once had to argue with them about covering anything, or get pre-approval, or been retroactively billed for anything they retroactively decided not to cover. That last part is almost priceless.
When I see horror stories, which are all too common, of folks who have necessary procedures and treatments denied, I can easily imagine the hours of fear and stress of fighting with the horrible healthcare companies which only care about making a profit. We know they automatically reject claims with the knowledge that some people will be too sick or too tired or not knowledgeable enough or don’t have enough time to fight back. We know they don’t give half a hoot about people’s health if they can generate higher profits or instant savings. The vast majority of healthcare companies are absolutely nefarious.
July 17, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 108: When I was 17, I started my first full time retail type job. Before then I’d only worked summer part time jobs and for my parents. I met lifers whose motto was “don’t rock the boat” because they just wanted to make it to retirement (15 years off) no matter how miserable they were. I experienced managers who were so inept they cried at work over their “best friend betraying them” (a direct report). I met people who slept with married people and got pregnant. I met people who slept with coworkers and got pregnant and even though they were unhappy, decided they had to get married for the sake of the kid. I met people who slept with coworkers and broke up, making the night shift super awkward for everyone.
It was a whole lot of life in one little building. In retrospect, I’m grateful for all those experiences that informed what I was looking for out of work and out of life: I didn’t want to have to keep my head down when work conditions were terrible for fear of losing my only job. I didn’t want to have to suffer silently. I didn’t want to let people be stepped on and stay quiet. I wanted to stand up for myself, to advocate for better working conditions, to advocate for everyone. I wanted options, respect, and no drama.
While I don’t necessarily feel like I have a lot of options now in case things go sideways, I do have the latter two in spades and that’s meaningful.
Year 3, Day 109: I’m sure everyone already knew this and I was just too stubborn/unmotivated to try but it turns out cornstarch is the secret to frying up slabs of tofu that don’t stick to the pan! I used some notes from this recipe and added cornstarch and garlic powder for my first attempt at frying tofu while following actual directions instead of winging it. I didn’t even need a spatula to flip them! Didn’t even use a non stick pan, either.
The garlic flavor didn’t come through at all. It smelled good but I couldn’t taste it. I won’t waste garlic powder next time but I will keep the steps of prepping hours ahead to let the liquid drain and adding cornstarch.
Year 3, Day 110: We spent $20 on a couple bags of raised bed and potting mix to add to the potato bags. I’d filled them maybe halfway a couple summers back. We grow small potato crops now and again, half a colander full at a time. I figured, even if I don’t grow a great deal more because we’re constrained by volume, a good soil top-up would do us good. Lots of plants are poking their way up through the replenished soil now, so I’m hoping for enough potatoes in a harvest to share.
We joke that these are the most expensive potatoes ever, $100 starting up a few years back and $20 now, and we most certainly have not gotten $120 worth of potatoes out of them but I have really enjoyed having an incredibly low maintenance little garden to dig in now and again and fresh potatoes to eat. It’s rare for me to say it’s not about the money, it’s about the fun, but that’s exactly what’s going on here.
Year 3, Day 111: I’ve been sad about my brother and our lost relationship lately. I saw a car that reminded me of his two best friends in high school. They were a set and I cared about them too but we all fell out of touch after they graduated from college and moved on with their professional lives while he remained stuck in the ditch of life. In what was probably a foolish attempt, I tried emailing the one I could find a work email for to see if he might want to catch up. It’s been three weeks and he hasn’t answered.
Maybe my email went to spam, he doesn’t remember me, or he doesn’t want to know me anymore. I’m still in touch or friends with most of my high school friends, 23 years on, and had always assumed we’d still be friends too. So that’s another small sadness.
Year 3, Day 112: The idea of the “friendzone” is such a weird concept to me. Is it some Harry met Sally “men and women can’t be friends” thing? Maybe it’s because I didn’t date much in my single years. I had a couple boyfriends through my twenties but generally most people weren’t interested in me. The (very) few that were weren’t a good fit. I didn’t recognize or reciprocate their interest. We didn’t stay friends after we stopped going to the same school. Maybe that’s what they mean by friendzone: I was fine being their friend, but they had only hung around in case I changed my mind, not because they valued my friendship or me as a person. Doesn’t seem like a worthwhile (or respectful) reason to stick around, if you ask me. I would hate to find out that someone I believed to be a friend had been hanging around solely in hopes of having a different relationship.
I have four male friends, dating back to junior high through college, who are very close, through-thick-and-thin-type friends. They stood in as my date for the occasional event that required one, without it ever being an issue for us or our respective partners who weren’t available because we were friends and only friends. Never once has the idea that we had zero romantic interest in one another diminished our friendship. We’ve openly acknowledged the fact that we had zero attraction to one another at one time or another without any awkwardness or stress. It just is. We’re best friends and best as friends. I cherish that. I wonder if people worrying about being friendzoned are open to having a deep non-romantic relationship with folks of their preferred gender or if that’s the only goal.
July 14, 2023
1. I finished my backpack repair!! The resurrection of a beloved backpack is deeply satisfying. It’s icing on the cake that it only cost an additional $3 in sewing needles on top of the other stuff I already had (thread, spare fabric, old lanyards, a sewing machine that works).
2. The ant bait recommendations worked wonderfully. I think it’s ok to draw a line under the kitchen invasion, that seems to be over. I baited our bathrooms that were still receiving several visitors a day. It’s odd though, they aren’t behaving as I’d grown to expect. Usually you see several scouts and then a full scale incursion hits the next couple of days. They sent scouts daily for weeks without ever fully committing so I don’t understand what’s happening. I wonder if they have a whole other strategy I don’t understand.
(more…)
July 11, 2023
How do you think you’ll be remembered? How do you want to be remembered?
I was thinking about this four years ago and shelved it. It’s hovered in the back of my mind as I take notes for my elder friends I will have to write obituaries for.
It bubbled back up after a recent therapy session: What would people say about you at your funeral? What do people think of you as a person? What do YOU think of you?
It’s always made me wonder if people know how they’d be eulogized. What would be the summary of their existence?
I buried this post because I wasn’t ready for that level of introspection. I’m probably still not, given my reaction to similar questions in therapy (I make it a point NOT to think about that!)
Back in 2017….
I’ve kept JB alive for going on three years but that’s a reasonably human accomplishment. Besides, after the first year, that’s less of a hazard pay situation and more of a fight the toddler’s instinct to self destruct. Our home was the result of a lot of hard work but survival isn’t a true achievement. (Well, it is, but not in this context.)
My soul is searching for learning and doing. My brain is craving new things to read and do. BUT. My body says no. It is succumbing to fjaka. Weariness weighs down my limbs, lava boils my joints (metaphorically but I also feel it literally), and no amount of metaphorical browbeating can get them to buck up unless and until they’re ready.
My brain craves a hit of accomplishment dopamine very regularly, was satisfied by the tangible completion of the house renovation weekly, and now that I’m off that particular hook, I’m in serious withdrawal. For someone who usually believes she can do anything, being in an “idle” refortification phase of life feels both strange and sometimes deleterious.
Now in 2023….
With the addition of Smol Acrobat, I still feel like my achievement wheels are spinning in mud. I don’t know what matters for me.
I did pick up sewing which has been an incredibly painful, though satisfying, hobby, when I finally figure out how to do something new. I’ve learned how to attach zippers and sew packing cubes and I’ve repaired (sort of) my longtime travel backpack.
I still measure my successes in the tiniest of measuring cups: did we feed everyone with a minimum of stress this week? Did we make it to each commitment on time this week? (Usually) Did we help out a Lakota family this month? (Usually) Did we send a birthday card on time? (Sometimes)
How would you want to be remembered?
My hope is that I’ll be missed, that I meant enough to someone for my absence to matter. I hope I’ll have helped people.
Don’t know that I can ask for more than that.
July 10, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 101: WEIRDLY smooth morning routine with the kids. Turns out it was the only smooth bit of the day. PiC got stuck at Costco for hours mid-morning, then was stranded when he got a flat tire that couldn’t be fixed on the road. I had to run out twice to drop him off and then pick up everyone.
Still, I was extra efficient and got through my regular work and 2 of 3 backburner projects. Not too shabby.
Year 3, Day 102: A couple friends came over in the afternoon to grill and played with the kids. We tried to strike a balance between keeping it simple and having a nice enough spread that everyone could enjoy something.
JB helped me skewer the veggies, we parboiled corn on the cob, and they all went on the grill with a tritip and hot dogs. The pie, ice cream, and potato salad were store bought. Unfortunately no one liked the potato salad much so we’ll get a different one next time. The kids didn’t appreciate much of anything but the ice cream and pie, of course, but they were willing to eat anything to get to the dessert so two thumbs up for motivation.
Year 3, Day 103: Double Monday! Having the day off yesterday was fun. Having two kids and a scared dog 🐕 who couldn’t settle or sleep all night because of the fireworks was an awfully high penalty to pay for the day off. JB had a hard time falling asleep but thankfully stayed down once they dropped off. Smol barely slept, continually popping up to look at me between 2-5 am. Sera 🐶 only slept after I gave her a double dose of CBD treats and melatonin. She’s still dragging today. I’m right there with her. I got almost two whole hours of sleep and woof. I’m not sure I can lift my arms much today.
Thinking about money, I’m ruminating on how we calculate our net worth regarding our home. I list our mortgage on the debit side. That’s concrete debt that we owe. But nothing feels right as far as listing the value. That is entirely hypothetical, since it’s dependent on someone buying at the price we are valued for. The cynical part of me views the assessed value primarily as a cost to us on the tax side, but not as an asset that we can rely on because who knows what climate change will do to the property values in the next couple of decades?
Year 3, Day 104: Erph. My everything is drained. But I have to keep going: get the kids out the door. Clear my work inbox/desk. Finalize management proposals I need to put in for long term needs. Covering for folks out on vacation and preparing for taking a bit of time off myself.
The list goes on and on.
Usually I’m pretty good about drawing a line under the day and saying that’s all, folks! But as we’re deep into summer (though it doesn’t feel that way at all), time sensitive stuff piles up and can’t be put off.
~~~~~
I suspect I’d be a more optimistic / positive person if my children would go to sleep and stay asleep at night. If it’s not one kid, it’s the other. Or both. I can’t remember the last time I had two nights of peaceful restful sleep in a row. 2013?
Year 3, Day 105: I’m nursing a cold of some kind. Tested negative for COVID, at least. I’d wonder who got me but this was probably fatigue related.
We visited our local library for the last time today. Bittersweet. They’re moving to an updated building but we love our little
July 7, 2023
1. Gave PiC and Smol Acrobat their haircuts this weekend. Smol hates their haircuts so it took a ton of energy and Lucky Charms to get through. JB’s next. Savings: $50 Remembering that we shouldn’t do three haircuts on the same day: priceless.
2. I let us both off the dinner hook over the weekend. We were wiped out from the week, and we had cooked all week which makes me feel better when I do resort to takeout. We had a treat of burgers and fries and shared a mini shake between the four of us. That last wasn’t specifically to be frugal. The shared mini shake is exactly the right amount for everyone in addition to their own burgers and a big helping of fries. Still, not wasting money on a larger shake, some of which could go to waste, feels like the comfortably frugal thing to do.
Helping folks: FOGA‘s friend is trying to escape an abuser, can you help?
ZJ’s friend lost her sibling, leaving her the sole surviving member of her nuclear family, and is trying to raise funds to help their brother in law be with their niblings during this time of grief.
(more…)