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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August 9, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 141: What a day. We had all kinds of cleaning up to do. PiC and JB worked on three loads of laundry, I worked on reconciling a bunch of bills, filing a tax amendment, contacting the school because two weeks out we still have zero information beyond “everyone will be required to mask”. The planner in me hates this school district. I cleared away some time critical work, and sent important personal emails.
Then as a soul cleanser, I tackled our next Lakota family’s list. I didn’t mean to dive in already but I spotted, buried in the requests, a mom with a newborn and no car seat. We had to get on that!
Naturally I then had to go on and take care of the rest of the family too while I was at it. It took a few hours to sort out an order that would actually ship to Pine Ridge. I completed half the categories of the list: car seat for baby and clothes for the older kids. I added some household things for mom because she didn’t ask for anything for herself and I’m sure that she could use a basic hygiene kit. I’m trying to remember what I’d wanted in those postpartum days. The other half of the list, baby clothes and school supplies for the older kids, will go out later this week.
Year 2, Day 142: Another heavy work day with exponential stress. Lots of scheduling conflicts and people having bad personal stuff going on which require accommodations and trying to make sure enough gears keep turning at partial staffing. The only good thing out of this moment is the timing is good to make a push for a staffing change I’ve been wanting for a long time that will help us long term.
I assigned the rest of the laundry to JB for the afternoon, they were allowed to take reading breaks as they wanted, and so by the early evening all the laundry was put away with minimal fuss.
I was happy to finish up the school supplies order for the kids and then while I organized a new basket to hold books for the kids and organized Smol’s clothes, I pulled out armloads of their outgrown clothes to ship a bundle for the new baby. I need to replenish my flat rate boxes stash!
BUMMER. The car seat I ordered yesterday from Target has been cancelled. They say there’s a problem with the shipping address, and they can’t charge my credit card. Um, since you have charged it 16 times today, and shipped 11 packages there already, I would say both those objections are bunk. I reordered it.
Year 2, Day 143: Would you believe that the second car seat has been cancelled?? I finally went to Amazon to order it because it’s a time critical item and they’re taking TWO WEEKS to ship it even with Prime. What is this nonsense? So amid my fight with the school district, my inbox, and my towering to do list at work, I am on chat with Target demanding an explanation for why on earth this item cannot be shipped. It’s really really annoying. (more…)
August 6, 2021
1. Getting to see a few people I have missed deeply lightened my heavy soul. I guess even I need a little in person time.
2. I’m slowly catching up on shedloads of work that I had to get through.
3. I missed a big annual bill by a few days, but I caught it in time to mail the check within the grace period and didn’t start to beat myself up over it other than feeling a gust of exasperation in the moment. Progress!
Challenges this week: We memorialized a dear friend’s passing.
Travel with little ones is HARD.
Preparing for a new school year hardly any better equipped or informed than last year feels awful. How are we still in this muddle?
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August 3, 2021
On Money
Income
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 and cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
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.
***
Dividend income. We received $207.20 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. Our YTD monthly average is $221.
We filed our 2020 taxes on time and I just assumed that because the rental property sale completely threw our income out of whack, we didn’t qualify for the American Rescue Plan Child Tax Credit. I based that assumption on absolutely no research – I didn’t even bother to look up the income limit. Turns out that we are getting something because we don’t make THAT much money and as SP explains, some of this is half our regular Child Tax Credit up front. I needed to decide if we want to get the monthly payments. I read an article saying that maybe families wouldn’t want to get the payments because they are banking on that big tax refund payment (not us) or because that unplanned for income would throw their tax planning off (maybe?). That may be us just because I do not have the brain power to figure out what effect it will have on our tax planning. I just didn’t have any more energy for this so I’m gonna bump up our withholdings a bit to hedge our bets and see what happens.
Little squee: three of my shirt designs sold and I’m as pleased with the wee bit of income as I am that someone liked my design. I made something that someone liked! That’s so cool!
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August 2, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 134: I woke myself up shouting at a neighbor for dismissing her kid’s attempt to murder my baby as “that’s just what kids do” and that really set the tone for my day. I won’t say it exactly went downhill from there, it just kept circling the drain as Smol struggled to nap, JB’s class started unexpectedly late and I had to scramble to get some Spanish activities together so they weren’t just wasting time, then JB couldn’t get themselves together enough to knock off 2 minutes of chores in under 20 minutes. I definitely lost my temper at the 15th distraction and shouted. I normally don’t shout but zero of the firm non shouting reminders or stern warnings worked.
I just want the house to myself for two hours. Just two hours that’s all I’m asking. Instead we’re getting ready to attend a far away funeral and it’s going to be time for me to be trapped in a car with a severely undersocialized extrovert for 9 hours and I think I will truly lose my mind. Bye-bye mind. Bye-bye.
*****
Over the weekend, I finally downloaded the last pictures up to the present time from our phones and cleared out the Google Drives so they’re no longer threatening to shut down. That’s Phase 1.
Phase 2 is renaming a whole hell of a lot of files and editing their metadata so they’re as correct as possible. That’s going to suck where I have old files that have been through multiple programs and lost the right file metadata. Phase 3 is deleting the 2 years worth of files I already uploaded to the NAS. Phase 4 is uploading all the completed files that have all the corrected file metadata to our NAS.
I’m giving myself a small break before I start Phase 2.
Actually, a small break and an interim task. I’m going to create the private shared file where I will be saving copies of our estate plan to share that and the action plan in case something happens to us. We’re going to need to change the executors of our will, and once that’s done, our executors will need easy access to the paperwork. I also want to make sure they have access to it sooner than later so we can have a conversation about what we want.
The point of this is to say: holy crap I’m doing my work so much faster when I’m JUST doing my work and not also juggling the two data streams. Also: man, I still got through all my work last week even while juggling multiple major personal projects. I’m pretty awesome.
***** (more…)
July 30, 2021
1. Our power went out right when I needed to prep a bottle for Smol and though I had a flash of annoyance, I thought you know what? Opportunity! We’re going to practice our disaster scenario skills! (Tons of good comments there that I didn’t reply to at the time because it was December 2019 right before the pandemic became a reality for us, so I need to go back and revisit.) I’ve been after PiC to do a dry run for a while and he’s been reluctant because he doubted that he’d like it. But I wanted to confirm, I don’t want to find out our supplies suck when we’re already miserable and stressed. It was fun! We heated water on the stove, cooked up three Mountain House pouches (thanks to Stacking Pennies for recommending them seven years ago!), and used our little silicon lantern for light at the dinner table. We didn’t really need it since it’s summerish right now and the light lasts until nearly 8 pm but hey, it’s a dry run. We also cranked up PiC’s crank radio to find the emergency station but we couldn’t find it. Something to figure out! The food was actually quite good. Chock full of sodium and I’m parched but it was tasty. PiC said they’d be exponentially tastier after a day of energy expenditure if we were to use them after hiking.
2. I’ve been running the robot vacuum every few nights now that Smol Acrobat is all over the floors, and it’s really quite satisfying to push a button, walk away and have wide swaths of the floor be clean later. After the fiasco with the cleaners, I needed a cleaning win that wasn’t using my precious energy.
Challenges this week: As people start to socialize more and we get invitations to things, I’m having anxiety nightmares about overbooking. One dream was about trying to make it to two weddings in one day! It was a mess.
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July 27, 2021
Or is this just the pandemic? How can we even tell?
My current job pays decent money and I have the accommodations that I need. I’m treated with respect, my staff are treated with respect, and my voice is heard. I’m genuinely good at the work I do and the work does matter in the world, to some real extent. I don’t want to have to find a new job or make the compromises that I’ve had to make at every other job.
So this is a not-awesome thing to feel: I don’t want to work. I am so tired of making my life and energy fit around work. I also can’t help but wonder how much longer I can ride this wave with this job. I would need my bosses not to do anything stupid for the next ten years. That seems like a really long time to hope they don’t make any changes I hate.
A friend reminds me that having the kids off to school will likely change the landscape too, which could influence how I feel, and maybe that’s part of the pressure cooker feeling: I have to do ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME right now.
Maybe when daycare is back and school is in session and my daylight hours are mine again, maybe I won’t hate spending those hours working.
I want to do nothing useful for at least six months. Just read and eat and walk the dogs and sleep. Maybe even twelve months. Then I will want to do something that feels good to me, and something that makes money. Maybe it’d be nice if they were the same thing. But I have zero desire to go from a reasonably comfortable good fit job to entrepreneurship if we actually need the money to live. That’s too much pressure of a different kind. I’d like to have enough saved that I don’t have to compromise on our standard of living and make real money without depending on it. Is that too much to ask? (When you factor in the part where I have no idea what I’d want to do and I don’t want to do anything I’m really good at professionally because I don’t love any of those tasks…. Yes. Yes that is asking too much.)
Segue into thinking about planning for financial independence: number crunching is my attempt at stress relief but it’s just fake endorphin juicing. Diving into the spreadsheet burrow and inputting a series of equations to game out possibilities temporarily generates a sense of accomplishment, a sense that I’m doing something to get us closer to the nebulous goal in the future when we know that the crunching alone can only draw a roadmap. It can’t move the game pieces around. Then the hit wears off and I’m deflated again because I can only do what I’m already doing: earning W-2 income, be here for my family, spend judiciously, invest regularly. Try not to freak out about the stock market highs that seem outrageous and overvalued.
Sometime in the last three cycles last week, one new realization dawned on me.
We are currently careful with our money, though we do enjoy creature comforts, so we can save aggressively. We save aggressively so we’ll have plenty of money in the future, we hope, to live off of for as long as we need it (we hope). My simulations are based on quite high annual spending projections to, as best I can, ensure that when we choose to step away from our jobs, we have the freedom to keep spending if we want to or have to. I don’t want to go back to worrying about money. Except, if we’re being honest, I’m always thinking about money now so why would that change later when I have more time on my hands? It won’t. I love thinking about money.
I’ve been thinking about how many early-retired people caution others not to rush to early retirement and to enjoy the journey there. Carl of 1500Days recently said: “All of this money stuff is fun to think about, but the real goal is to enjoy life. If you’re so obsessed with winning the money game that you forget to enjoy life, you’ve lost. I know this from experience. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone slower. Hell, I might of actually still been working.”
I get the point. I haven’t forgotten to live today in pursuit of the far-off tomorrow like I once did. PiC and I spend money on things that make us comfortable (insulation!) and happy (cool stamps! special cheese!) and sane (childcare! again! someday!). I even dumped our rental because it was eating my sanity and happiness. We aim for an equal amount of removing alligators and adding kittens. We’re doing the best we can without sacrificing the important things of today. But I can’t help quietly fretting over our savings rate. It feels like we’re creeping along at a snail’s pace and it feels like we’re not going to get there “in time.” My health is improving with therapy and exercise and diet changes, but it’s still a vast gulf between where I am now and being healthy, free of constant pain and fatigue, with energy.
It feels like I’m not doing enough. It feels like there’s so much more I should be doing to grow this nest egg exponentially so that we don’t run out of good years and money to support those years. This year’s rash of losses underline the fact that while we ARE living today, we also don’t know how many more todays we have. I don’t want to spend the majority of them working, and I don’t want to run out of the freedom (aka money) to enjoy life today and tomorrow and next year. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope.
:: How are you feeling at this stage of life with your job and your future plans?
July 26, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 127: At first, I thought this was a GET THEE OUT OF THE KITCHEN kind of day.
I boiled 6 eggs to make deviled eggs. They were all boiled the same amount of time and yet 3 were soft boiled, 1 was fine, the last 2 were put back on to boil because I didn’t even want to risk it. I added three more eggs to a new pot to boil and forgot about it and burned the eggs and the pot. Then I got into a fight with the formula dispenser and spilled half a pod of formula all over the counter and the floor. By midday, point, I was just grateful that no living beings were hurt.
It turns out my ill luck was more widespread than that. Everything I touched went wrong in some way. I made bulgogi, roasted broccoli, and roasted potatoes. The bulgogi was sort of watery, the broccoli cold, the potatoes slightly underdone.
I’ve been fighting to reclaim data on Google Photos with zero luck, it won’t budge despite my having downloaded and permanently deleted several GBs of files and photos since last week. I found a folder of 2017-2019 photos in Drive taking up space so I dumped that too. Somehow, a spreadsheet I use daily to store project notes, financial research, and other important stuff was caught up in that, and permanently deleted. I had to sit with some pretty nasty feelings for a while when I saw that “file was deleted” note. So much work, gone.
And given the number of times I saw warnings about “are you sure? Deleting these files permanently means they cannot be retrieved” I know they’re gone gone.
I’ll have to recreate it from memory as best I can over time. I’ll also need to look into how to sync my Google Drive files to our NAS because if I lose any even more important spreadsheets, I really will throw up.
*****
Money things, my phone. I’m running up against a serious lack of storage again. I only took the 64 GB phone when I upgraded to the Pixel and gave PiC my iPhone a couple years back. That was foolish of me. I’m on this mega mission to move all the photos off our devices and backing them up elsewhere so if I can get that done, I will reclaim that storage. I really don’t want to have to replace my phone until next year. I just bought a new phone for PiC last year, I’d like to go a year in between phone purchases if possible.
Year 2, Day 128: Maureen’s tweets (below) very much encapsulates how I feel about the world right now and travel. I still don’t want to because THE NUMBER OF DECISIONS we have to make with every single thing we do is overwhelming. (more…)