Archive for the 'General' Category
August 14th, 2008 - Where are we?
I’m so disappointed that I missed this. Tuesday, Eric took Maggie to the grocery store, something he typically does once or twice a week. However, for the first time in ages, he went to the cereal aisle (to get some raisin bran). On one side, sugary sweet cereals. On the other, candy galore.
Maggie looks around and asks, “Where are we, Daddy?”
Woohoo! My daughter doesn’t recognize this grocery aisle!!!!!!
August 12th, 2008 - Workshops
My brother is correct, the workshop in the back of the garage doesn’t actually need electricity to function as a workshop. Perhaps I should have also added that there are no windows and hence no light except that which comes in from the doors. That, actually, is far worse than the lack of electricity for a workshop, to me.
That’s why we only use it for storage. So far–I bought a solar light this spring. But sort of forgot about it and now it’s just one item on a long list of things to do around the house this summer.
August 8th, 2008 - The garage
Last weekend, we finally did the annual spring cleaning of the garage. I know, we’re a few months late. Oh well! We’re so delighted with how it looks that I want to share pictures. No, we don’t have the best looking garage in the world (far, far, far from it). But maybe it can inspire a few other folks to clean things up. In particular, after 6 years of being annoyed with the lack of places to put things other than leaning against the wall or hidden in a couple drawers (which mostly couldn’t open because of tools leaning on said walls), we bought a number of organizational tools. That’s mainly what’s in the pictures.
First, let me explain the layout. We have a detached garage which is technically for 2 cars, but only 2 compact cars. Which we don’t have. So we use about 1/3 of it for bikes and mower and such stuff, plus storing recyclables. This area generally gets pretty trashy in the winter as we don’t take time to store things properly. The previous owners built a “workshop” on the back that is a little shorter than the garage and about 8′ deep. There is electricity in the garage–one outlet and the garage door opener. Although it enters from the workshop, there is no electricity in the workshop itself. IE, it couldn’t actually function as a workshop, despite it’s name.
These first pix are in the workshop. The white wall is the former exterior back of the garage. Newly painted when all the lead paint abatement was going on. The tool hangars are just what I’ve always wanted–but it took Eric four stops to find them! We first got something at Menards, but it was all aluminum, and didn’t cinch, so it would have worked only for items with handles not just poles. He spent a couple hours the next evening running around to all the hardware stores to find the right item, finally at Lowe’s (which we avoid since it’s a new big box retailer in town). Woohoo! All these tools used to be a pile against the wall next to the door instead. In between the tools is the doorway to the garage (just barely visible in the first pic).
Just inside the workshop door (the one to the outside, not the one to the garage) is an old cabinet that I’ve used for gardening tools and supplies. The tools were in front of this cabinet before, meaning I could barely use the cabinet. Now it’s free and clear! And many of the hand tools are out of th drawer and hanging up. The fancy organizing tool for this job? A bunch of large nails! We also got a few hooks, which the green bag and whatever’s next to it are hanging on. We still need to find something for Maggie’s gardening tools, which don’t have holes in the handles, so they need some kind of double hook. Or to have a hole drilled in them; then I could loop some cord for hanging, just like some of my tools already have. You can see that we haven’t completely cleaned this area up yet.
And in the main garage, here’s a shot of the drying rack for the onions and garlic. It’s an old screen from our front porch when it had cool old windows (that didn’t work well and were covered with lead paint).
Last but not least, while I had the camera, I shot my bike and Maggie’s, plus her Trek bike trailer, since I’ve mentioned them before. You may be able to make out the lovely interior walls of the garage in the shot. If you can call them walls. That’s being generous. There are just various pieces of wood (mostly thin particle board) put up here and there, plus one nice section of peg board, except that it’s on the driver’s side where we park the car, so not very useful. And we can only part the car there, because the other side, the one with the bikes, has a beat up floor that includes some, for lack of a better term, potholes. Someday, we’ll replace the floor.
August 7th, 2008 - Painting the den
For the last two weeks, we’ve been having the den painted. We thought it would be 2-3 days. It took 9. We called in Reeves to do it because we’re 100% certain there was lead paint underneath the wallpaper. (I don’t have a pic of the wallpaper, but it was really old and falling down. We took down the old doorbell a couple weeks ago. The paper behind it hadn’t even faded. Durable, but ugly.) Plus, we just aren’t very good at painting and I refuse to tape our woodwork again (there are like 14 corners per window or something like that). The den, AKA Eric’s room, is the only room that hasn’t been refinished something in the last 30 years (although the kitchen is likely right around that point!). So it’s about time….
That paint wasn’t in great shape. And, as we found out, there were lots of cracks (expected) and even a hole:
Ralph spent the first 3 days tearing off the wallpaper, putting up a bonding agent (which had to be redone many times due to the amount of wallpaper glue–as we expected and told them to expect given the living room), and fixing the holes (they had to cut out one area it was so bad) and cracks.
Then he skim coated it all on Thurs. It took way longer to dry, despite the heavy duty fan in there for hours (and overnight). They had planned to put up the orange peel coating in the afternoon, but couldn’t. It was hot and humid outside.
Then he got an abscessed tooth early Friday morning–sudden and requiring something like 6 stitches. So nothing was done Friday.
Monday, they put up the orange peel. That hadn’t dried by evening, as I found out when asked to check it. Everything was dry, except one small area that I put my fingers on. See how well they covered the woodwork and floor. Far more than we would have done if doing this job on our own. I appreciate the care that was taken.
Tuesday, it got the primer and the first coat of paint, Sherwin William’s Derbyshire (just like the street my Mom grew up on), in their low VOC version! (Couldn’t get the no VOC one as the color was “too dark” for it. It did not look dark with one coat and we were afraid.)
Yesterday morning, the final coat was put on and most cleanup was finished, with a bit left for this morning. Ralph also said he could put the woodwork back on that was removed for the floor refinishing. Way cool! (unfortunately, we still have to have someone else come in for the living room as it’s too crowded with the den furniture for Ralph to do it this morning.) I like the color; haven’t asked Eric yet.
At some point in there, the ceiling was painted white, too. I have no idea when. All of the ceilings in our house are white. Except for the two that are drop ceiling tiles like you see in office buildings. (The LR, DR, and den also have ceiling tiles, but the kind that are attached to the ceiling itself.)
August 4th, 2008 - Some day, just for you, Uncle Monkey
Sock Monkey tutorial. I can do this! I’ve made other dolls, just with regular fabric. It’s the exact same principle, just with a sock instead.
July 30th, 2008 - My first massage in over a decade
As promised, I scheduled my first massage after getting to 155#. (Not sure how I’ve done it this quickly, but I’m down 8 pounds already.) I tried to get one for the weekend, but she’s only available M-F. So I did it last night after work.
It was lovely. Heavenly. Relaxing. I wanted to sleep on the drive home–so next time, we’ll see if Eric can drop me off/pick me up. For the rest of the evening, my sciatica didn’t hurt. ::sigh::
Wish I could get one every week. But it’s $55/hour massage ($35 for just upper body 1/2 massage). It’s a great incentive to keep losing weight!
July 23rd, 2008 - Losing weight
I’m doing a rather un-simple thing this summer, but ultimately, it should make life simpler. Like the majority of Americans, I need to lose weight. This is something I’ve never admitted to anyone other than my husband before in my life. I was always a pretty decent weight (well, looking back at pictures from 7th-10th grades, maybe not?) except at the end of grad school when I was underweight for a year. But oh so slowly, the weight crept up. Not excessively; I’m 5′6″ and 161#, BMI 25.something. But enough that it’s bothered me.
Part of it is due to the sciatica, which has decreased the amount of cardio exercise I can do. Until a year ago, I walked 10,000-14,000 steps every weekday. then I started realizing the sciatica disappeared when I was sick and sitting around the house a lot. Sure enough, I cut back on the walking and the sciatica got better. I tried pilates, yoga, and deep water aerobics at work, but they all exacerbated the pain as well.
So, since I’m not going to lose weight with exercise, that means I have to eat less. Which is really hard for me as I believe I’m a pretty good eater overall…although I do like snacks and dessert. So I’m counting calories at Calorie Count Plus (from About.com). And I have daily goals, rewards, and punishments set up. This post is to help keep me accountable and to get it written down on…um, the screen I guess.
- I must eat less than 1700 calories a day. We may drop that to 1600 after 1-2 months, still not sure on that. 1500 is what I’m aiming for, but I don’t want to kill myself just because I go a little over a few days.
- If I go over 1700 twice in a week, I pay for Eric and Maggie to eat at McDonald’s. This is the major punishment Eric thought up to keep me on track. Maggie has never eaten at McD’s and I never want her to. (I’ve watched SuperSize Me and other books/movies about the fast food industry. I have eaten at only one fast food restaurant since–the locally owned Culver’s.)
- At the end of the month, I have to pay the house $2 for each day I go over my calorie allotment. (Why $2? Because that’s about how much I’d get if I took my monthly allowance, less charitable donations, on a daily basis.)
- Whenever I lose 5#, I can go get a massage. I’ve only had one or two in my life and I’d love to get them all the time. They are the ultimate indulgence to me. I never ever spend the money for them, however. So now I’m going to. Eric’s gym specializes in rehab, and has a massage therapist available. I am hoping that she can work around my sciatica appropriately. (After it was massaged in physical therapy–granted things were pretty bad at that point–my leg cramped up and the area was blazing in pain.) Oddly, I will pay for this out of my spending money, which means I could do it or could have done it at any point in time, but it’s still a big huge treat that motivates me!
I started on the 12th. So far, I’ve lost 5 pounds! I’m going to go with the 5s (155, 150, 145, etc), however, so one more before I get a massage. And I have to keep it off, so one brief appearance on the scale doesn’t mean I go make an appointment for that very day. I recognize weight can shift (and scales can be off) so it has to be an honest 5#. It was relatively easy last week, but this week, I keep wanting to eat junk food and trying to avoid eating what’s good for me to save calories for candy and dessert. Not so good. :( But at least I recognize it happening.
The website is great–it has a huge database of foods, both whole/natural as well as brand name processed, with nutritional info. You select what you’ve eaten (or plan to eat) and it tracks the info for you. You can also put in your own recipes and it figures out the nutrition. This is great because I make a lot of my own foods. I didn’t realize it was there at first and almost when to other sites for this piece of things. Thank goodness I started reading the help pages! (Hello! What do I always tell my faculty to do? Read my help pages….) Turns out my fruit bread is worse than I thought but my veggies burgers are better than ones in the store. Too bad I like the fruit bread so much…so I’m trying to just have regular bread.
Oh my goodness! I just checked: The amount of fruit bread I have has less calories than having two slices of bread with butter. Aack. But I log the bread one piece at a time and the butter is also separate. So it *seems* like less than the fruit bread which is counted as a single serving. I should also figure out exactly how much butter I use–is it really a tablespoon?
Well, anyway, there it is. And yes, I’ll let you know if I have to pay for Maggie to eat McD’s food and am totally humiliated. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing it if no one knows?
July 22nd, 2008 - The universe is trying to tell me something
In the past week or so, THREE blogs I read have linked to the same video: Grace Writes about it the day after my birthday. And I can’t find the other two. I thought it was Tia or Blogging on Purpose but neither of them have it. Oh well. thank you to whoever did post it and make my day!
Then today my Astronomy Picture of the Day was the video as well.
Last week, after watching the video a couple times, I bought the soundtrack (one song, written, as far as I can tell, for the video but I’m not sure) and I’ve listened to it an awful lot. Combined with inspiration from reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, I’ve been trying to meditate with it as well as each night.
I’m not sure exactly what the universe is saying, but it has to be something important to have come up even on the picture of the day…when it has nothing to do with astronomy and isn’t a picture!
What is it?
Interested in the song? Here’s more info at Amazon, where you can also buy it. Here’s one person’s info about the lyrics:
The text is from the Bengali poem Gitanjali (”Stream of Life”) from Rabindranath Tagore:
Bhulbona ar shohojete
Shei praan e mon uthbe mete
Mrittu majhe dhaka ache
je ontohin praan
Bojre tomar baje bashi
She ki shohoj gaan
Shei shurete jagbo ami
Shei jhor jeno shoi anonde
Chittobinar taare
Shotto-shundu dosh digonto
Nachao je jhonkare!
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
I wish I knew what praan means.
And see more of Matt at Where the Hell is Matt? including a previous tour of the world (mostly dancing alone) and outtakes.
July 17th, 2008 - In search of Seymour Papert
I wonder if any of my readers, other than my brother, who sent me this story, are familiar with Seymour Papert, but just in case, I wanted to share. Seymour Papert was one of my luminaries in graduate school: he worked with kids and computers. Not just worked with them, he did amazing things. Ever heard of the computer language Logo, or turtles (in relation to computers), or LegoLogo, or Lego robots? Thank Seymour Papert. They were all his ideas for teaching kids programming.
18 months ago, he was in a severe accident and suffered traumatic brain injury. The Boston Globe has a feature story about his recovery efforts. I hope he recovers, as he was still contributing, even in his late 70s, to the field of educational technology.
July 16th, 2008 - about this time last year
I just read a lovely post by a lady approaching her birthday, where she revists the last few years and decades. I thought it would be fun to try to do the same thing. Since I haven’t done it in the past, I might be hazier than she is.
Oh, yeah, it was my birthday on Monday.
A year ago…2007
Things were about the same. I was participating in One Local Summer, something I’m not doing this summer. Monkey and AnnMee (my brother and his now-wife, then-fiancee) were visiting and we went blueberry picking, something I managed to never even mention in this blog.
Two years ago…2006
Monkey and AnnMee were visiting us before they’d started dating. I was already hoping they’d get married. I was buying a lot of stuff, like a compost bucket (that we still love and is still in great shape), worms for vermicomposting (which did not work out), and a hand cranked cell phone charger (which didn’t work out as I got it shortly before I sliced my thumb open with the blender and couldn’t use it). We were sighing in relief that we hadn’t bought the Elmwood house and dealing with lead paint in our current house. (By Dec 07, she was safe.
Three years ago…2005
I was dreaming about building our own home (scroll down to the 2005 entries) in the country.
Five years ago…2003
We were working on our homestudy for adopting from Russia. (Hmmm, not to carry on a theme, but that didn’t work out either. Or did it?)
Ten years ago…1998
I was trying to realize that I needed to break up with my emotionally abusive boyfriend. I did so in mid/late-August. I didn’t actually realize it until early August but I’d known all summer something was really wrong.
15 years ago…1993
I was spending the summer in Pennsylvania, where I knew absolutely no one but my parents and some of their friends. They moved there the previous year and I thought it would be a good idea to spend the summer with them. I found work through a temp agency working as an over, short, and damaged clerk at a shipping company. It was actually quite fun and like no other job I’ve ever had. (Including that I always wore a dress! In a trucking terminal, no less. And we had about one visitor a week. I don’t know why we had to dress up.) I really wanted to go back to the MidWest and help with the major flooding, but my brother was visiting from Hungary (he only came home once in 3 years I believe).
20 years ago…1988
I turned 16 and had my second birthday party. I had saved a copy of the hand drawn invite from my 9 year old party and reused it. One girl was actually invited to both parties!
25 years ago…1983
Couldn’t tell you what I was doing….
Oh this was so much fun to write! I hope I remember it again next year. :)
June 28th, 2008 - If you wondered what happened to acid rain
Have you noticed no one ever talks about acid rain anymore, which I strongly remember as the biggest environmental problem of our my adulthood? Mental Floss explains what happened to it. (Short article, but in short: It’s decreased greatly, although it hasn’t gone away completely. And what do you know: cap and trade WORKED.)
June 26th, 2008 - Getting rid of stuff
Have been doing a lot of purging the last few weeks. Each week, I think I’m done for now and have made three Goodwill trips in a month. And I’m set for another one this weekend. Mainly, it’s baby/toddler stuff. Since we aren’t planning on more, there’s no point in saving most of it. We are keeping a box or so in each size of our favorites to hand down to Monkey and AnnMee when they have kids. (Only through size 3. Even if they were to have a baby in a year, that’d be 3-4 years before they’d need clothes Maggie wears now. That’s way too long to save stuff.)
A couple I know from work just got two foster daughters and they’ll be taking the indoor swing and highchair. At first, it was just the swing, but when I emailed her last night saying I’d found all the pieces, I mentioned the highchair again–and she’s taking it. We are thrilled to pass them along to foster parents. (I’d also offered clothes and toys, but they’d already hit garage sales the previous weekend.) The girls are younger than Maggie and they live on a small farm. We’re hoping to go visit them next week.
The crib still needs to go. For now, it’s still a handy place for diapers (since we never had a changing table and don’t have a dresser). We’ll see if the women’s shelter would take it.
Need to get the bag of baby bottles up for donation. And the cradle.
June 23rd, 2008 - Why I haven’t gotten rid of my cell phone yet
The Good Human has a nice post about why cell phones should be expensive instead of free. I really appreciated that mine was free, however, when we first got cell phones 2 or 3 years ago. It made it easier to switch having a bit less to have to spend on it. When looking at our bill the other week, I noticed that we could get a new phone for me without hassles. I perused the available free phones and left the site without doing anything.
Was I tempted? Sure! My phone is a bit banged up, the camera is barely worthy of the title (it wasn’t a consideration when I got the phone), and I don’t get very good coverage. I know other people’s phones work near my office, but I’m lucky to get reception by the doors–usually I have to walk outside and then wait a minute for it to find coverage. I’d love to have a phone that worked in the hallway at least. Or even in the entrance way. I work in the basement of a library. It’s not terribly surprising that the phone doesn’t work (Did you know libraries are exceptionally reinforced? Books weigh a lot.). I wouldn’t mind except that I see LOTS of students and others using their cells down here so there is coverage. My phone just isn’t powerful enough to find it.
On the other hand, I very rarely use my phone. It’s more of a watch and a timer than anything else. It’s simply not necessary for my to have coverage everywhere. I use less than 30 minutes a month, not counting weekend calls to my parents.
But an iPhone…..think of what I could do with that!
If I do decide to get a new cellphone, The Good Human also suggests a few recycling efforts.
June 13th, 2008 - Rain, rain, go away
We got 4.88 inches of rain last weekend. It was wet and some places flooded but okay here.
We got over 5 inches of rain yesterday evening. It wasn’t okay anywhere in Oshkosh: they even evacuated some folks via boats. Lovely city here, but it’s between two lakes and the interconnecting river. That spells problems every time we get a heavy rain. Our basement had a small stream running through it (I could even see where a tiny spring was bubbling up). The back yard was mostly under water. The garage probably flooded, but we didn’t check it last night. Unfortunately, we still had some boxes of stuff from cleaning out the car a week ago. Hopefully, nothing important was in them. I’m pretty sure the atlas is back in the car already. A lot of the spruce tree needles are no longer under it but on the concrete in front of the garage. That’s pretty weird looking.
My garden was flooded. Mostly the paths on the west side, but a few beds were under water. I’m hoping the dill and carrots Mom planted Tuesday survived (they weren’t underwater).
The street was flooded up to or over the curb. Many people drove through the street, which surprised us. Until I read the online paper and discovered that most of the city streets were flooded. One crazy lady decided to drive on our grass to avoid the water. It doesn’t look too bad this morning; thank goodness she had a smaller car and not a heavy pickup.
BTW, my parents are visiting this week and I’m mostly on vacation from work. Hence the lack of posts. We had plans to go to Portage in the middle/west of the state today. Given that they had roads closed yesterday due to previous rains, we figured last night’s storm would make things even worse. Not to mention that many roads between here and there are probably flooded. (The river that runs through Oshkosh runs over to Portage and we’d be crossing it many times. Except that it’s flooded everywhere.)
I hope our farmers are okay, especially our CSA farmer. (I got to meet her last week at the farmer’s market, so I feel even more connected to her farm now.)
Hope you are all staying mostly dry!
June 7th, 2008 - Chemical free bug stuff
Eric found this for me, and I definitely want to try some of them: Homemade, chemical free bug repellents, particular the anti-ant one. I’ve just known about boiling water, and that always risks the other nearby plants. Ants always make colonies around my bulb garden. And I have some Dr. Bronner’s mint soap!
June 7th, 2008 - Car will be paid off in just 16 days!
For the past year, I’ve been thinking about how our car loan will be paid off in July. About 2 months ago, I started talking about it. Yesterday, I decided to look up what the final payment would be. I’d been guessing it would be smaller than the regular payment, as that’s the way our house mortgage worked (and that’s the only payment schedule I recall seeing).
To my great surprise, it will be paid off this month! Oddly the payment will be $2 more than usual, but who cares? 16 days till our car is our’s! Woohoo!
We’ll be setting that payment amount aside now. Our hope is that this vehicle (a Honda CR-V, 2003, BTW) will last us another 5 years. We hope to have a good amount saved up towards our next car. Given that this one will be 10 years old, we figure it will be needing work between now and then, so we are unlikely to save the entire amount we’re putting aside. But we’ll have money for repairs. And even if we needed no repairs at all, we’ll only save about $22,000–and that’s about what the CR-V cost 5 years ago. Unlikely prices will go down. But even if we spend half of that on repairs, that’s still a great downpayment.
This is the third car I’ve paid off. The first was from my parents, although I just kept paying them $100 a month until it stopped working and I bought a new one. I consider it paid off since I didn’t have a loan on it when I got rid of it. My second car was a Saturn which I loved. I had a loan via my credit union at grad school, and I think we paid it off a year after leaving. It was nice to no longer have to send a check back there. I guess we owned it for about 7 years. We didn’t need a new car at the time we bought the CR-V, however, we were pretty sure we’d be having 2 dogs and 2 kids eventually. We already had one dog, and he wasn’t so great in the back seat. And he was getting bigger. And Eric didn’t particularly like the car–it was a smaller car and he wasn’t terribly comfortable in it.
I know, I know, it’s odd to be an environmentalist driving an SUV. I realize that all the time! However, with 2 large dogs and one kid, a car wouldn’t cut it. We could do a mini van, but I don’t really like them. And the dogs would have freer rein in the car. In the SUV, at least most of the time, they are contained in the back. (Emma wasn’t restricted on that with her first family. So when we leave the car, she usually runs up and sits in the driver’s seat. And eats any candy or cough drops she finds. She’s awfully cute as a driver.)
So, anyway: 16 days until we have only the mortgage payment. WOW.
June 5th, 2008 - No TV for a week
A nice side effect of the floor work is that our TV was unplugged all week. The LR TiVO (the HD one) was also unplugged although the old TiVO was left plugged in–but the TV wasn’t attached. Not that it would be comfy watching it on the porch anyway. We picked up some videos at the library at the beginning of the upheaval. We started watching one, but both found it boring. And I never picked up the rest. I read instead! (Plus worked late 5 nights, but that had been planned long before.) The only show I missed was So You Think You Can Dance, which is my second favorite reality TV show (the first being The Amazing Race). But, we set up the old TiVO to record it.
And it didn’t record.
Oh well! I missed it and am disappointed, but the week without tv reminded me that I’m always wishing I watched less. A forced week made it lots easier to give it up moving forward. I have to be honest–I usually watch less TV in the summer anyway so it’s not completely due to the floor work. But it was a nice kickstart. I intend to delete a number of shows on the TiVO that I just haven’t felt like watching before and I’ll go through the scheduler and take off a few other shows that haven’t been very interesting lately. I’ll fill the time working outside (and in) and reading.
Oh, and another added benefit. Um, actually, not sure it’s a benefit and I’m not sure why it’s happening: I’ve been having trouble sleeping, like waking up around 4 am (instead of 5) each day this week. Gives me lots more time to get stuff down around the house. Last night, I stayed up an hour late to see if that would help. Nope. I was out of bed before 4:30 again.
June 3rd, 2008 - First exta payment $4
Sent off the first extra payment on the mortgage over the weekend. $4 from some rebates. Feels lovely to have sent something off!
Ummm, I should note that I wrote the previous post last week, saved it to check something, then forgot to post it. So it refers to the adoption. Obviously, that has changed, so we’re moving right into the new budget.
So far, I think we can put $50 towards the mortgage each month. After the new year, it might be even more. Right now, we’re dealing with over $1200 in vet bills from last month (besides Pi getting sick and dying, Emma was also quite ill. And we thought it was Jedi, so he was seen first, then Emma for something else. Then 2 days later we discovered Emma was the one throwing up during the night.). And we decided to up retirement to 17% and charity to 3% (each a 1% increase). The easiest way to do that is to take 17% of our gross income for the year, so I did. IE, we aren’t increasing it to 17% for the rest of the year, but rather for the whole year. Which means that during the rest of the year, we’re going to increase them each by 2% (actually, more than that, as I was paid extra for teaching and the MBA work through July. IE, a more than half of our income came during the first half of the year).
I didn’t actually do this intentionally. I created the new budget then when I could sleep that night, I started thinking about it and realized what I’d done. Blame Quicken–it shows the current month’s budget and the whole year’s. To figure out 6 month’s, you have to manually add up those amounts. I simply took the yearly total for my income and multiplied it by 3% and 17%, subtracted what we’d already budgeted, and divided the remainder by 6 to see what we needed to increase it all by. (Not including June because we’re using income from this month to pay off the adoption expenses already spent on the homestudy.)
Boy, does this sound complicated and I wonder if anyone is even interested. Oh well, this blog is also for my own records of things we’ve done to be frugal and live simply. :)
Oh, and I’m putting more of our retirement savings in my 403B, so we might realize more tax savings, and have even more to put towards the mortgage. Or the house fund–we want to fix up a few more things now that we have some freed up money. We’re loving the new floors. The guy to give a quote on the den is probably there right now, and we might see if he can replace our back doors while he’s at it. (If you didn’t notice on the pix, the den/office’s wallpaper is peeling. It’s ancient, so we’re 100% sure the paint behind it is lead based paint. We aren’t required to abate it at this point, but we’d rather since we can afford it. So we’re calling in the same guy who did all the other LBP work to do the room.) Every other area of the house has been painted or wallpapered in the last 20 years so it’s about time.
June 3rd, 2008 - Book review: America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money
I’ve subscribed to The Home Economiser newsletter for a couple years. The authors came out with a book recently, America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money.
It’s similar to all the other books about being frugal and saving money and all those things I love to read about. I like reading these books because there’s always something that jumps out at me, even if the books seem quite similar. In this case, it was their dedication and ability to pay off a house in just 8 years. (I think they’ve done it twice, but I might misremember that. They might be doing it for house #2 right now.) It gives me the drive and desire to work on paying off ours. We’ve often talked about it, but then something else comes up–lead paint, adoption, you know those sorts of major events that cost tens of thousands of dollars that always crop up. (LOL. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen to other people like it does us!) I’ve come up with a possible budget post-baby that would allow us to put a little bit more each month towards the house.
And we’ve agreed that the money we used to put in the pickle jar would go towards the mortgage. When we started paying off the lead HEL, we switched the pickle jar to that. Then, when that was going well, we started splitting the larger monies like from rebates, testing, Deal Barbie, and credit card cash back in 3s–pickle jar, Eric, and me. (And the pickle jar fund morphed into funds for treating visitors. Which we ADORE doing.) Except for testing, the money will go 1/3rd to treating, and the rest towards the house. Since testing is considered work (we pay taxes on it, and we split child care the rest of the weekend), we’ll split that as before. We’re not talking large sums of money, but an extra dollar now on a 30 year mortgage saves a surprising amount of interest. (Quick estimate with 5% interest on a $100,000 loan,an extra dollar a month saves you $471 in interest on a 30 year mortgage. Or almost 1 month’s payment.)
Well, anyway, back to the book. It was a fun and easy read. One nice touch I’ve not seen in other books is that they have comments from their kids (5 teenagers/young adults). Sometimes they love what their parents do, and sometimes they complain a bit. Some of the information is very specific (such as the section about what discounts they’ve found with insurance companies), but all of the sections talk about how YOU can do the research and figure out how to save more money.
At the same time, they encourage having fun and not denying life’s pleasures. It’s about moderation and what you choose to spend your money on.
The book’s chapters cover specific topics including groceries, budgets, cars, housing, vacations, kids (I rather like their payday system for allowances), investments, and finally, attitudes. Much of the information has also appeared in their newsletters, but I still enjoyed reading it again all in one place. (Plus a lot was new since I’ve only been a subscriber for 2 years or so.)
I’m considering getting the book and newsletter as a gift for my brother and sister for Christmas. What do you think?
June 2nd, 2008 - FlyLady missions: living room
This week, the missions have been in the living room. I’ve quite dutifully followed them. WARNING: Monkey and AnnMee if you read this, please don’t tell our parents. We want to surprise them next weekend.
On Monday, we were supposed to clear off all the surfaces clutter. Check. I rarely have a problem with this. And I solved it even better on Tues.
Tuesday, we were supposed to do a thorough vacuuming, including under the furniture. So we (okay, Eric) moved all the furniture out of the living room and den.
We skipped vacuuming, however. Went one better. On Wed, we tore up the whole darn carpet and threw it in the garbage.
Wed’s dusting mission will be saved for after all the sanding is done since there’s no point in dusting anything this week. On the other hand, we have completed the mission for the living room. There’s nothing to dust! (Actually, this mission is usually about decorative items. that’s always easy for me to complete since we have no decorative items to dust.)
Sanding? That’s right. The floor is being completely refinished! It’s dried to a satin finish; this photo was taken shortly after the third coat was put on.
