My two favorite things about ACE

One, they have nice, clean tables, perfect for holding your knitting pattern, laptop or what have you...and also they have POWER! (hang on, now I hafta get a picture of that...hi, never mind me, y'all, just your average every day fruitcake taking pictures of the underside of tables...)

Second thing is actually the car behind me - which is a well-policed 'sleeper' car. There are TWO such cars (of six total), where yakking, video games, excessively-loud earbuds, and phones that screech the theme song of Hawaii Five-0 are STRICTLY verbotten. The lights are dimmed, and the ridership culture strong enough that even the crassest, most belligerent of f-bomb dropping teens will find themselves knocking it off, or leaving the car.

Perhaps BODILY. Who did it? Some guy in a hood, and nobody saw it and the staff will strive diligently to find them, but GOSH, they don't appear to have anybody on board that meets Carl's, er, the ejecter's description...(ACE crew: Adore! them...short-nice, firm when they have to be, ultra-cool whenever possible.)

I actually ride them more in the evening, when my psyche is reeling from a day of noise-bombardment only destined to get worse (much, MUCH worse!) when I descend into the swirl of activity that is my beloved Den of Chaos.

Haha, victory is mine again!

Seven minutes to ACE train. I maaaaade it, I maaaaaade it, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-...wait...why am I all happy again...?!

[Ed: Snort! Typical! I don't NEED it today, soooooo, she's a-runnin' six minutes late today...]

Mine, mine alllllll mine...!

This is one of my dirty little secrets: Frequently upon completing the (bi)weekly grocery shopping, I snag whatever sweet-thing is on the loss-leader rack by the registers...you know, the same stuff I am always going, "Pfffft, NO! Dude, that ain't even FOOD right there!" whenever the Denizens beg and plead for it.

And then I eat it in the van on the way home.

Like a demented squirrel with a Top Secret nut he doesn't want the Squirrel Police to know about.

Nom!!!

Math and guns

The husband, laughing so hard he could barely talk, just asked me to come watch our Eldest’s little speech on the ‘farewell to Mr. H’s class’ DVD – the end of year compilation of all the adorable children from sixth grade. (This was from last year, mind you.)

So I stood there and watched my darling child tell the camera, in her earnest and slightly nerdy way, the following:

“Yeah, OK, so…math? It’s kind of boring and stuff? But? You can totally use it to make, like, bows. And guns. And stuff like that. Yeah. That’s what my mom says, anyway.” {smile!}

{head-desk}

And now I know why alllllll the teachers at her school tend to kind of…look.at.me., all funny like that…

(Funny thing being, our actual conversation on the topic was more like, “Well, shoot, honey, think about a bow and arrow…now, you can use math to figure out how many pounds of pressure per square inch your arrow exerts on the target and how many feet it travels per second, and then you can experiment with different bows and start making note of what changes cause which effects, if a shorter bow with a bigger arch makes it go faster or hit harder, and then you can incorporate those findings into the next bow you build, see? And you can get better at hitting the target in the first place if you can get a basic understanding of geometry, how shapes work, and the physics of movement blah blah blah, mom keeps going LONG after the pre-teen’s attention span has officially ended, blah blah blah…)

(Except that she obviously retained the key words ‘bow’ and ‘gun’ and ‘math’ and then threw them all together in her ‘bye, Mr. Teacher, it’s been so awesome being your class and by the way I’m totally going to build myself a gun using the math you taught me, buh-bye!! {smile!}” speech.)

(Once again…{head-desk!}…)

Little details

This has been one of those weeks, commute-wise.

Monday, I had a little trouble with the part of the commute where I get my arse out of bed. So I was running just a hair late and then I was maybe a hair and a freckle late and then I totally missed my train. So I drove to BART because I didn’t want to be the extra hour late and the car tire didn’t look too deflated. (Yeah. I’ve…really got to get around to getting that tire actually fixed, as opposed to seemingly fixed, only it kind of goes flat again over time.)

Tuesday, I had a little trouble with the part of the commute where I say to myself, Dude, seriously, are you planning to have crackers for lunch AGAIN?! You do too have time, throw together a lunch. NOW, MISSY!

And then I missed my train by about two minutes and once again drove to Train #2 because once again, the stupid tire isn’t looking significantly flat and I’d rather not be late getting in. Because if I’m late getting in I’m going to be late getting out, and that means more crowded trains and the danger of not getting home before I hit the Wall of Tired – which sucks because when I hit that wall before any dinner machinations are underway, the cranky-whiny-irrationally-angry thing is not pretty.

I worked from home Wednesday because I had sort of planned to because in related news, I had planned to tackle this dude I want to help, and I had found this itty-bitty corner of his daily calendar that wasn’t solid meetings and was all, “Ha ha! I have you now, because while it may be six a.m. in California, it is nine a.m. back there in Charlotte so even if you are working banker’s hours you should totally be in by then!”

…except that he walked straight into a meeting that wasn’t showing on his calendar and curses!, I worked from home for “nothing” except that it was kinda nice that instead of having to get up at 3:30 to make a 4:49 train so that I could be in the office by 6:30, I could totally just roll out of bed at 5:30 and be working by 6:00.

Working from home rocks that way. Although it rocks even more when you roll out of bed at 8:00 and get cracking by 9:30 after three cups of coffee, a thorough reading of the newspaper and maybe even a shower.

Just sayin’.

Which brings me to this morning, when I had a little trouble with the part of my commute where I recognize the sound of my alarm for what it is even sort-of LIKE my job and on the whole think that probably my manager could TOTALLY do all this on her own without me and how about I just go back to sleep now and NOT go to work at all, that’d be fine today, wouldn’t it? perhaps stayed up just a HAIR too late watching anime on Netflix and perhaps should have NOT done that only c’mon! There were only two (2) crummy episodes left in the whole series and it’s not like I was dropping acid and robbing liquor stores, people! found it a just a little difficult to get out of bed and maybe hit the snooze button one time too many, and then said, “Eh, fine, I’m not even going to try for it, I’ll just catch the 6:09 or 6:06 or, whatever!” and then I went back to dozing around (because I almost never actually get back to sleep on these occasions), and then (eventually) I got up and got dressed (even remembered earrings, for carp’s sake!), and I made my coffee (both the Contigo and the backup Thermos) and then I grabbed stuff for lunch because I am so damned organized that way (snort!), and then I got in the car and I went, “Ooooo, man, yeah, I’m shaving it a leeeeeetle close, here, but no worries – I’ve got a full ten minutes, and it usually only takes eight to drive over there!” and can we just pause here for a moment to contemplate the difference two measly minutes can make, because GUESS WHAT?!?!?!

(Please to note: Queen of Run On Sentences That Make No Sense – I still own that crown. Peace to my peoples!)

Aaaaaanyway, guess what?!?!

I pulled into the parking lot at precisely 6:03:45.

Just as the crossing guards were coming down across the road.

And I said…well, I said something like “Oh my gracious and dearie me, it appears that I may be about to miss that marvelous train, bless it and all its crew members!”

Yeah. Something like that. Ahem.

And then as I went through the motions, pretending that there was some way I could get through the parking lot, park, yank my assorted bags out of the trunk, trot my backside alllllll the way over to the platform and dive through the already closing doors and make it…the doors closed and off she went into the hills.

Without me.

AND I HIT THE ROOF. BECAUSE! It was 6:04. SIX. OH. FOUR.

And that? That? Was the 6:09. Wait. 6. It was the 6:06, and it was 6:04, so…What. The. @^*&@, ACE?!?!?!?!

I was so incensed that I got out of the car (I have no idea why this was necessary, but apparently I felt my rage should not be kept in an enclosed space), grabbed my phone and got on the Internet for ACE rail contact information so that I could read somebody the riot act. SIX. OH. SIX, PEOPLE! AND IT IS SIX. OH. FOUR RIGHT NOW, SO WHY-WHY-WHY AM I NOT ON THAT @^*&@*&ING TRAIN?!?!?

(We shall conveniently ignore the fact that getting my backside out the door in a slightly more timely fashion would have been of great help on this.)

(And that perhaps deciding to finish off an anime series – which I can only really watch after the Denizens are safely in bed on account of because it may have been a tad on the gory side – was probably not my best plan ever on a work night.)

And thus it was that I learned that six.oh.six is actually…the six.oh.four.

…oh…

Fortunately, I learned this on the website and not by being told so by somebody who had just been chewed out by me about their lack of consideration and inexcusable ahead-of-timeliness.

And then I started to kick the tire because something had to suffer along with me.

And then I noticed that, just to mock me, that stupid tire was all flabby again.

I considered my options very, very carefully.

And then I went and bought doughnuts for the Denizens, drank some more coffee, annoyed the husband until he gave up and got out of bed, and settled in for another work from home day.

Where one of the keywords for my position is attention to detail.

I was born for this line of work, people.

Seriously.

(Oi. So glad Friday is National Congress Resolved At Some Point We Are Pretty Sure And If You Do Not Believe Us You Can Go Look It Up On Their Website That It Is A Basic Human Right To Work From Home On Fridays No Matter What Day. I’m a little afraid of what might happen if I were to miss that train again tomorrow…I might spontaneously combust or something…)

Not that I'm counting, but...

Statistically-speaking, I have roughly 312,816 hours left with this particular incarnation. And 233,256 hours of working life ahead of me. I should have increasingly-less dependent, yet nevertheless constantly underfoot Denizens around for another 129,888 hours or so. I have another 32 hours of work-for-paycheck to go this week...1777 hours altogether for this contract.

Whole lotta time right there.

And yet...finding the guesstimated 2.8 hours left to finish the knitted-on border for this shawl...seems...challenging.

Ah, time. Such an abundant kind of scarcity...

Hel-LO, what's this...

I am suffering from a MASSIVE case of motivation deficiency.

I had a TINY amount of ambition first thing this morning, but that was about two hundred years ago and is only remembered as a mythic legend.

I frequently am not exactly squealing with EXCITEMENT over chores, but today I am not merely unenthusiastic, I am downright recalcitrant about it.

Don't wanna...ain't gonna...

SO INSTEAD OF TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS (which I am SO going to regret later)...I am...uh......cleaning out the closet!

I think I bought this in 1994, the year it was put out...I used to do these  CONSTANTLY...until suddenly, there were TODDLERS in the house. Eeeeeeyeah. Toddlers + Scissors + Butterfly-shaped yarn organizer = Disaster waiting to happen...so I put it (and whackity-uncounted unopened kits) "away" until Someday, when it would be (relatively) safe to leave such things out.

That day...has come.

And I am so happy, because it is enjoyable to do this again.

And I am ever-so-VERY-slightly melancholy.

There are no babies in the Den anymore...no toddlers I must  protect from pokey needles and sharp scissors, who will unorganize my yarn and maybe eat it...and no frantic phone calls to the long-suffering advice nurse because I can't find my needle and Baby is acting like she's got a tummy ache...emergency pediatric visits...

...OK! Melancholy gone now! Back to pretty girly flowers and Advanced Chore Avoidance...

But then, there was bonus rock candy

So, meanwhile in other news...I have had a miserable, rotten, no-good cold all week. ALL week. It started last Thursday with a sniffle and has raged up and down ever since. And by 'up and down,' I mean 'I am tricked into thinking it is getting better while the 12-hour decongestant is working, only to be rudely disabused of this notion when it abruptly wears off six hours later.'

Last night before bed, I was playing the 'I can't POSSIBLY still be contagious, I should probably go in to the office tomorrow' game.

Because I had just taken my nightly dose of prescription pain medication for my Usual And Customary hip/back pain, AND a snort of Afrin.

...feelin' pretty darned good, thank YOU...

Then, at 2:24 in the morning...ping!

Sweating. Sneezing. Congested. Headache. Chills. Ugh, hot! Chills! Hot! CHILLS! HOT!...achoo!-hack-hack...(repeat for four VERY long hours, because do I have sense enough to just GET UP? Of course not! No, I'm just SURE that I am going to get back to sleep any second now, because I'm so damned tired.

That this has seldom ever happened without chemical assistance never enters my mind.

And then it was time to get up, so I did.

And I am epic-tired and will probably take an actual sick day today.

Because brain dead and SQL Server don't mix well.

And my daytime decongestant isn't WORKING, and I don't have any clean JEANS, and none of my favorite SOCKS are clean either...I mean, REALLY.

Could this day get any less pleasant?!

Oh well...at least there was still a LITTLE syrup left for my pancakes...(rattle-rattle-PLOINK!)

Eeeeeeeeee! I gots the 'last of the maple syrup' rock candy!

I WIN!!!!!!

Paying Down v. Holding Onto

This is such an awesome (and not at all ignorant) question!! From the post yesterday, Elizabeth asks:

OK, but I have an ignorant budget question. Sticking with your scenario of spending only $200 of the $650 grocery budget example...

Why, instead of holding the unspent grocery for later - even though we know there will be a later - do you not dump that onto debt? Is it because when that killer month comes you don't have to add back to the debt? But, even if that's the case, doesn't it save you some interest? Is it just too complicated this way?

It’s a perfectly logical thing to do, putting any ‘extra’ cash from the household budget into debt reduction. You do usually save at least some interest, although the actual savings can be less than you’d think – especially if you’re going to turn right around and charge things back on, and your issuer is using the ‘average daily balance’ method to compute your interest charges. The longer you go between ‘extra payment’ and ‘extra charges,’ the better off you are…but, well.

Let’s say you’ve got $5,000 sitting at 15.99% on a card with average daily balance interest calculation (which is the majority of credit cards – check your statement or {gulp!} disclosure agreement if you’re not sure if that’s how your card rolls), and your normal payment is $250. This month, you add that extra $450 from the grocery budget to your payment.

Normally, your average daily balance after the $250 payment was applied on day 3 of the 30-day cycle would lead to a monthly finance charge of (roughly) $63.52. If you make that extra $450 payment and charge nothing new, you end up with about $57.92 – saving yourself $5.60 in interest.

But, if on Day 17 of the cycle you put that $450 back on the card to buy something you now can’t afford because you made that extra payment instead, your average balance at the end of the full thirty days earns you a $61.32 interest charge – you’re down to only $2.20 saved in interest.

And if it happens earlier in the month, even just a week earlier, say on day 10, your interest savings drops to only $0.80.

On the one hand, it’s still a savings…on the other, it would be (for me, anyway) a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. Day 3 when I make the payment I’m all, “Yay me! I rock! I’m paying an extra $450 to this, yippeeeeee!”…and then, a week or two later, I’m pulling that card out of my wallet and thinking, “…dammit, I suck…I shoulda known this was gonna happen…meh…” {begin downward spiral of self-loathing, buy a few extra things since a) I’m a lost cause anyway and furthermore b) a little pick-me-up is probably needed around now and plus c) not like it matters since we’re all doomed anyway, etc. etc. etc.}

But even if I wanted to do that anyway…I personally can’t. The accounts I’m paying down at this point aren’t available to me in that way, so if I send them money I can’t turn around later and say, “Wait, actually, I need that back!” and charge something new to them.

Meanwhile in other news, I’ve sharply limited my ready access to new debt. I can’t just run out and charge up things if I find myself short – I’ll just have to let whatever it is go if the money isn’t there for it. Which I find to be less awful than ending up with a whack of new debt I didn’t want, but which is still darned annoying when I had known this day was coming, but instead of being smart and keeping the money I knew I needed, I’d gone ahead and blown it all on Something Else – because it was there, and the Something Else was there, and oh…what the heck!

That’s why this has suddenly become a more difficult challenge for me than it used to be; back in the day, I could smooth out those hills and valleys quite a bit by using the grace period on Old Reliable. Now that I’ve switched over to a card with a lesser limit and gotten rid of all the “extra” cards I wasn’t using, I’ve been discovering just how hard I used to lean on that available credit.

Which of course was what got us into the first round of trouble, you know? I could float things, so I did; then I could finance things, so I did; then I could make the payments work…on increasingly tight margins…so I did. Because whatever-all I was buying seemed so necessary, so important, so not-optional.

Hindsight is so much clearer than day to day vision. When I look back, what we got in exchange for all those new debts was so not worth the price we ended up paying, especially when I throw in the stress of watching the security we fought so hard to get crumble like a dried-out sandcastle around me.

I remind myself of that whenever I get frustrated with my new limits, when I have to let something I want pass me by because I wasn’t able to get the cash together for it, when some stupendously awesome deal pops up on my radar and ooooooooh, gawd, I want to grab this, the price per unit is just crazy good…but…it’s a $150 minimum purchase, and I only have $100…it frustrates me no end. It makes me feel poor. It makes me feel like I’m not doing it right, somehow.

But at the same time, I know I am doing it right. I’m not going to let us go there again, not without having to work at it a little harder.

So, for me…I need to hold onto money I know I’m going to need, and keep it available to me when the time finally comes to part with it.

Even if there's a really good sale, or I find myself tempted to add just that little bit more to the debt repayment.

It just won't be worth it, in the end.

Money Monday: May 16, 2011

Well. I finally got around to fiddling with the budget. Gads. You’d think it would be easier by now…but it isn’t, for the simple reason that I am a crazy person I have somewhat extraordinary buying patterns.

With a lot of outliers.

Which is fancy statistics-speak for randomly scattered big line items.

Which is another way of saying, I do things like buy meat by the whole animal and maple syrup six gallons at a time, plus instead of buying a nice little supermarket-box of Cream of Wheat, I order up a 25-pound sack of farina (which is what Cream of Wheat is, in case you didn’t know that) (which very few of us do, before some smart aleck comes along to go, “Hey, did you know Cream of Wheat is actually just farina?” in oh, EVERYBODY knows that! tones so that you’re all, gee, what’s wrong with me, that I didn’t know that, I must be a real dufus or something! when actually, I suspect there’s only about nine people in whole world who know and/or retain this information).

Which tends to make my monthly grocery bill look like this:

January: $Negligible
February: $Negligible
March: $YOWSA!!!!
April: $Negligible
…and so on…

Same thing with the clothing purchases, which tend to be made in two or three B-I-G shopping experiences rather than a bunch of little nibbles throughout the year…and just about everything else, really.

What I then end up doing is really kind of laughable. Obviously, I know I need to look at a good, long period – twelve month at least.

And equal in obvious-factor, I need to abide by those numbers, and not start playing, “Oh, ya, but…there was That One Thing in there, sooooo, I can totally shave, eh, a good $300 off that monthly figure…” game.

PLUS, once I’ve managed to overcome my denial and smoothed those numbers down into a workable budget – I need to stick to it. In both directions.

We have a tendency to spend what we have. It’s just human nature – and if you have given yourself $X to spend on something, and you don’t spend it, well! It becomes mad money, right?!

But I can’t really do that. If I’ve got a grocery budget of $650, and I only spend $200 in a given months, I can’t just go ahead and spend the other $450 on something else – I need to just hold onto it, in the ‘grocery’ envelope, and wait.

The Big Spend is coming – inevitably, it is coming.

So one of my big challenges is to really pay attention to how my spending is lining up with the overall budget, and to try to stay with it – even if my “problem” is what appears to be excess cash piling up. (And if I don’t actually end up needing it, well, so much the better! But if I do…I don’t want to be sobbing into my decaf about how I shoulda knoooooown this was coming. It’s embarrassing. And then I get pissed about it. And everything just kind of goes downhill from there.)

Overall, though, I think I’ve got a workable go-forward budget in place; the core expenses are all covered by the husband’s paycheck, which leaves mine responsible for childcare and pushing forward on the bigger goals – paying off those remaining bills, bumping up our savings, and trying to position ourselves better for the future. It’s cool to see things line up like that again; we’re still pretty close to the margin, but if I can stay the course and keep working those expenses down, pay things off and keep reducing obligations, we can come out of this (ahem) experience with nothing more than a few new scars on our psyches.

Which we can pretend we got in a knife fight. Oh, THAT debt-related paranoia? Ya, got it in a knife fight in the outback, mate…THERE I WAS, surrounded by ninja crocodiles…!

The following blog silence is brought to you by…

…10 Secrets of the LaidBack Knitters: A Guide to Holistic Knitting, Yarn, and Life , which finally arrived.

It’s one of those eye-catching books. You know, with pictures. Of yarn. And yarn- wool-bearing critters. And things you can make with the yarn that the yarn- wool-bearing critters produce.

But sadly, so far, there are only about nine things I want to actually make.

Wait. Ten.

But that’s about it.

Oh. Except also that one.

Tell you what. I’ll get back to you with the final count of things from this book that I’ll soon be whining about not having enough time to even think about starting, ‘kay?

(All kidding aside, this is a visually stunning book. I could sit here and stare at the pictures of yarn all day long. And perhaps tellingly, I see nothing weird about that.)

Faceplant +10

Wow. I hit a wall last night. This happens from time to time; I mean, there is the usual 'end of a long day' tired that it would be irrational not to expect, given my too-early alarm and refusal/inability to get to bed at an hour that makes sense given said alarm.

If I want eight hours, I have to be in bed by 7:30.

Yeah. THAT'S gonna happen.

So generally, I'm going on between four and six hours of shut-eye. Which means that I'm prone to a unique form of lethargy in the early evening.

But last night, {long, low whistle!}

Yeah. I was in bed shortly after 8:00.

And I think I'd actually been asleep for a good hour and a half by then.

BUT, on the plus side, I feel sooooo much better this morning!

And, I'm almost halfway through the knitted on border of the shawl!

OH yeah. Life is good...

Pointed Monday and Food Altars

Yesterday evening, I made a double batch of a new recipe; I had decided that this year, I wanted to try more new things, ESPECIALLY the "fiddly" stuff I'm always passing up because I decide they can't possibly be worth all the huff and bother.

But I don't usually go for a double batch on something NEW. Because, who knows? What if I hate it? What if it's gross? What if, upon reflection, I want to tweak the recipe a tad? (That ONLY happens about 93% of the time, after all.)

BUT. The Food Altar at work has been even more neglected than my blog these last couple months.

And I have lost THREE entire patches of "crops" (is a 20 x 15 patch enough to warrant the word "crop"?). Possibly it is just coincidence, sure...or the fact that I do not have the available time to apply the organic pest control methods of hand-picking the varmints off my fields, or washing their leaves plant by plant with anti-chewing-varmint soap.

But MAYBE, the Food Gods are irked with me for not honoring them by plonking baked goods onto the Food Altar for my team to share.

Which is why I made a double batch of apple bread - a cardoman-scented yeast bread with thin slices of cinnamon-sugar coated apples tucked into it. One entire loaf vanished before it was even cool enough to touch with bare fingers, one is in the fridge at home for Denizen breakfasts, and the other two are on the Food Altar to appease the Food Gods and feed my team.

Also, I'm on the pointy, knitted-on border of the Spirit of the Southwest shawl. These knitted on borders are such a psych..."Yay! I'm done, the last row, row 202 at last, all 393 stitches of it, wooooo hooooooooo, now I just need to...knit these 24 fiddly rows...about....800 times...at thirty minutes per pattern repeat....(sob)..."

(but it's awfully pretty...I'll forgive it in the end..."

Why perfect organic apples are rare and costly

This is one of the most fiddly things I've done to date out here: A technique I picked up from an organic methods article to help achieve apples that are neither full of bugs (big No Want), or hopelessly scarred (eh, whatever, I ain't selling to no supermarket - long as the flavor is good, they can be as fugly as they like).

So, you take Ziplock sandwich bags, zip them around your budding apples, poke a couple small holes for drainage, and there you are. Hopefully, these protected fruits will be worm-free and unblemished.

And it took approximately forever to do just a couple dozen 'test apples.'

Which is probably why a supermarket organic apple of perfect skin is so danged price. I can't imagine doing a whole tree, let alone a whole ORCHARD!

(Our bug problem is epic this year. LOTS of 100% crop death. Bitter reminder about why it was that we humans worked so hard to develop the pesticides we now disdain...)

Lacy pings and drunken monkeys

I had the day off yesterday...where of course "off" is a word that is...open to interpretation. But my back had started firing warning shots Sunday, so I had decided to be all sensible and some junk, scratched all the "heavy lifting" and "crouching" and "hunched over like a gargoyle" stuff off my list.

"A little light housework," I said, "and then we'll switch to Equally Important But Less Physical Computer Stuff."

Less than half an hour in to my light housework, in the VERY FIRST ROOM, I saw...something...wadded up behind my rocking chair. DARN THOSE KIDS, I groused to myself, and grabbed the front of the chair to slide it forward so I could reach whatever-it-was...

It never ceases to astonish me, how my back can DO this to me. It will let me do all manner of inane things, and only punish me with a mild-to-moderate level of next-day ache. And frankly, if I do NOT engage in a certain level of inane physical activity you wouldn't think was a good idea, my punishment is generally worse...it might feel good at the time to just loaf around, but it rapidly becomes this downward spiral where every little thing hurts more and more, until I have become a Couch Slug and practically require a shot of morphine straight into my spine and hip to get moving again.

But then, after being all forgiving like that...I will do something like this...pull a light chair, which is on runners on a Berber-style carpet so it slides so easily it's actually annoying, and........ping!

...and I'm sitting breathless, weeping and cussing and telling myself encouraging things like, "Don't you DARE throw up! You think you can handle the carpet cleaner right now?! I DIDN'T THINK SO, YOU JUST SUCK IT UP, MISSY!!!!!!"

Because I am a good nurse like that.

...sigh...

I'm going to be moving *cautiously* for a while...

BUT GUESS WHAT WAS BEHIND THAT CHAIR, ALL WADDED UP AND FORGOTTED?

Lace. Specifically, a Southwest Shawl from Fibertrends.

...you just never know what the Den is going to disgorge, whenever you start tidying up...

Ain't no stupid on this kid

Yeah. Mommy grabs her keys and has a list?

Invite yourself along.

There is probably ice cream at that store...act cute, maybe a "spontaneous" hug, use some good, clear words and badda-bing, badda-boom...ice cream.

No stupid on this kid. He KNOWS how to play the game...

Apples and Cherries!

Eeeeeeeeee! See? SEE? My little trees, they are making with the fruit-thing!

Everything else is off to a slow (or no) start. We are having another cool-side spring this year, with a scattering of 'surprise!' not-quite-freezes and persistently cool days. But we'll be getting our warm weather soon, and our downright hot stuff before we know it, and my little Kingdom will take off!

Lessons In Sexy: All in the phrasing

"Wow, thanks for holding the bus for us! You probably had to run, huh?"

(Begin Lesson In Sexy)

Sexy: "You bet I did... like a cheetah!" (Important: STOP. HERE.)

Not-so-much-sexy (though perhaps with more points for honesty): "You bet I did....like a cheetah! A very old...toothless...arthritic cheetah..."

(...yeah...Option 2 was what came outta my mouth...sigh...sexy: thems as can't do, teach, y'all...)

A sock, a shoe, and the last muffin

I am traveling light(er) lately, so I grabbed the socks I'd started about forever ago for my train project...man, is it ever nice to have some truly "mindless" knitting for a change! I love to keep things interesting, but sometimes those itty-bitty charts and no-two-rows-alike patterns are a bit TOO interesting for mobile knitting.

I just polished my shoes! And now I'm just so tickled by my own cleverness, you'd think nobody else had EVER considered doing this. But at the same time, it's just so charming, the way an application of polish and some vigorous buffing can transform a tired old pair of ugly shoes into like-new, isn't it?

And this is the last lemon-yogurt muffin that will be made with "our" lemons this year. Sigh...but, hopefully I'll soon have some blackberries to use instead!

Money Monday: April 25, 2011

Whoa. Hang on a second, I need a dust rag…phew! Only two weeks, and just look at this place…!!!

It’s been an interesting couple weeks around here; frankly, the next few weeks are probably going to be equally psychotic. I had two rapid-fire Big Projects at work, and had a few nights of impressively bad insomnia, which sucked every last drop of spare energy out of me. I tend to operate on a pretty tight margin, energy-wise; when something tangles up my energy-pattern…it’s ugly.

But, all things run their course in time. I’ve started almost catching my stride again; I’m still kind of tired and out-of-sorts, but overall I feel like I’m probably going to make it through the coming days without either dropping dead, or ripping someone’s head off for doing something like, I dunno, dropping their Starburst wrappers on the train floor like they just don’t care. (FLAMING DEATH!!!!)

I had a very interesting development at work, which is that my manager put in a request for a special extension on my contract. These aren’t exactly unheard of, but they are not exactly common, either; they can be devilishly tricky to get signed off. When she told me she was going for it for me, and expressed great confidence that it would go through…man, the optimist in me was all, “Oh, awesome!!” and started planning for another year of All This – the paychecks, the madness, the crazy schedule, how to keep food on the table more or less reliably, and what would we do about the summertime childcare…

It has taken a great deal of effort for me to maintain a certain sangfroid on the subject. But then, I got an email from my contract management folks last week saying that they had been informed that the contract had been extended for another year – through the end of March 2012.

Well, hot dog. Looks like I get to stick around and keep on irritating helping my team for another year!

It’s awesome news on a few fronts. I mean, obviously, duh, I still get my paychecks. I won’t have any gaps while I go find something else, or have to deal with that whole dating job-hunting scene again for a while…the endless phone calls, driving around for interviews, trying to decide from that thirty minute window of chatting with a bunch of strangers if this is the kind of place I’m going to want to hang out for forty plus hours a week, every week, for however-many months…

A team like the one I have is hard to find; I really enjoy the work, the people, the projects, and the overall atmosphere.

So I’m really happy to be sticking around there for another year.

But I’ve also got some adjusting to do. Last year, I just went hell bent for election toward a single-minded goal – I used my income like a club and just whacked away at the debts in a wild frenzy.

Crude, but effective: We paid off an awful lot last year.

But, well…it was also crude. A lot of things could have been better, if I’d been better focused and taken more thought and care with what-all I was doing.

Have you ever noticed that things just kind of go better for you when you start from an organized place? I mean, like, if you’re going to make cookies, and you can put your hands on everything from the butter to the cookie sheet without having to go on a treasure hunt for them, man…you can go from cookie-wanting to cookie-eating in less than half an hour.

…but if the butter has gotten dropped down behind the milk somewhere and the cookie sheet isn’t where it belongs and who put the mixer paddles in there, for carp’s sake…!, well.

It can take hours. And be so frustrating that you never want to do it again.

Finances are kind of the same way. If you don’t know where stuff is, or how much of it you have, or where it’s supposed to go, if you spend hours looking for That Thing you need only to end up having to give up in disgust…it can take forever to get where you want to go.

So for the coming week(s), I have a couple goals.

One is to get enough sleep. Because seriously…I am not a good person to be around when I get all sleep-deprived and some junk.

And another is to get some control over what-all I’m doing in this coming year – to batten down the hatches, so to speak. I want to take a hard look at our statements, make sure I’m not missing things I should be catching; not paying too much in interest, or for services we’re not using. I want to reevaluate things like our phone service, cable bill, and all those kinds of things. Do we need what we’re paying for, or are we just paying for it because we think we need it…or because we’re not thinking about it at all…?

I want to reset the game board, too; reevaluate what-all we’ve still got outstanding and decide as if the world were new again where our priorities are.

I want to take a hard look at where we’re spending money, and make sure it’s where we want it to be going. I’ve been relying an awful lot on habits to keep us on the straight and narrow, budgetarily speaking…but things change, and change abruptly. Asking myself if the way I do things still makes sense today is an exercise I don’t do as often as I should.

And then, I want to chart a course for this next year. I want to set some (at least mostly) realistic goals, and figure out what I need to do to make them happen, and then…well, get going. Make it so.

I think it’s time to switch to a more elegant tool; put down my club and trade up to a rapier.

Or, as my dad so frequently put it: To work smarter, not harder.

What about y’all? How long has it been since you last looked at, say, how many minutes you’re paying for, versus how many minutes you use on that cell phone we all seem to tote around anymore? Are you paying for 250 channels when you only watch five? Paying for a gym you never use? Paying $35 a month for some protection plan you forgot you signed up for in that moment of weakness?

Are you managing your life? Or just sort of managing?

I always find this to be an interesting exercise…and no matter how well I think I’m doing, I always seem to find things that make me go, “Uh…oops?”

And another thing I want to do this week…get some pictures of my cherry trees. Because they have actual cherries on them, and I’m so excited you would think I had invented cherry trees!

(They’re so awesome! And bright green! Really bright green! But they’re cherries! I might get, shoot, a whole cup of cherries off that Bing tree! Possibly two cups! I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!)

(Sadly, I’m not exaggerating all that much…I am really excited about those cherries…which is practically like hanging up a sign that says, “Dear Birds, please eat every last one of these immediately, k-thx!”)

Grumpy Hoodie Days

Today was THIS kind of day - soda and pain killers, and a constant battle with a (fortunately rare) Foul Mood.

Days that involve regular doses of pain killers can be like that...and this one started less than two hours after the last one ended, in a blaze of back pain. Feh!

Also? I wore black pants today. And then angrily worked on horribly-shed-y hoodie.

Once again, I look like I walked through green chalk dust...

...but today is almost over now. Home and its many diversions awaits. Whew, made it...and I don't THINK I even snarked off to one person! Yay me!

The Garden Report: April 9, 2011 (Picture heavy!)

It has been a very busy few weeks out there in the garden! Lots of digging and trenching and moving and planting! And this morning, I got up ridiculously early – a combination of the husband’s Blackberry whistling and alerting and carrying on due to production job load failures (awesome) and our alarm inexcusably going off (does it not know that this is Saturday?!), and I found myself wandering around my kitchen at the crack of dawn looking for something to do that was, you know, quiet.

And then I thought, Taking pictures of your garden and blogging about it is quiet!

So here it is…my kingdom!



(I really need to remember to take before pictures. You could barely see the play equipment for the weeds a few weeks ago.)

The first little bed is spinach; it was just planted a little over a week ago, and is starting to send up the first sprouts.



This is why I don’t let anybody else weed in this bed right now – this SO looks like grass / a weed, doesn’t it?!

Right next door are some Blue Lake bush beans. They were planted right around the same time, but are much happier – I suspect they don’t mind the boomeranging temperatures we’ve had over the last ten days (50 one day, 70 the next, 50 again, 80, mid-40s…).



Behind them, all along the fence, are the omnipresent (at least, when the weather is on the cooler side) peas.



We love us the fresh peas around here.

This is a big old bed of broccoli.



And their neighbors, the carrots…



I spent some extra time getting the carrot bed ready this year; I dug down a good 12” (oooooh, mah achin’ back!), broke things up and churned them around, then built up those extra-high hills of extremely loose, sifted dirt. Using this extremely high tech device:



What I’m hoping for is longer, straighter carrots. Hahahahahahaha! Yeah, right. But, last year we got a lot of carrots that were beautiful and straight for about 3-4”, and then got all stunted and weird and twisted, because they hit the cement clay. So, we’ll see if I actually get anything for all that extra work.

And at the end of this row, the not-dead artichokes.



Now with actual artichokes!



Now, if you turn around, you’ve got the Bonus Bean Towers we found in the shed last weekend. There are Kentucky pole beans planted all around their bases; we’ll see how they work out. We’ve got what should be about a 30’ row planted in this itty-bitty bed…if it works, this is an awesome space saver. (If it doesn’t, well, we’ll always wish it had, right?)



Next door, we have a couple rows of hot peppers…



…and back toward the patio, three (3) crummy hills of summer squash. (Yeah. “Only” three. Which will probably produce about 3,000 pounds of squash.)



Now, if we turn left, we see AAAAAAAH, HOLY CRAP, WHAT *IS* ALL THAT?!?!



Oh. It’s the brush pile. Heh heh. Yeah. Weeeeeeeeeeee…need to deal with this. At some point.

This is my new compost “system,” which is (obviously) a project in progress for the husband.



Eventually, it’ll go like this: Stuff from the worm composter, yard waste and all that groovy jazz will go into the tumble-composter for a couple weeks for a “fast-hot start.” Then it gets dumped at the far end of the compost bed. The movement goes down the line, with the “finished” stuff taken out at the far end, and Everything Else turned toward said far end as we go.

What’s going on here is a whole lot of staging areas; eventually, that bit at the end will have a built in sifter, just high enough that the wheelbarrow can get under it, but not so high that I have to lift a shovel, you know, up over my head or anything crazy like that.

Anything that doesn’t sift out goes back to the beginning of the ride for a repeat; the good stuff goes on out to wherever it’s wanted.

Oh. And meanwhile, we’ve got some ‘bonus’ potatoes growing in there.



SURPRISE!!! We had planted white potatoes in that bed – which failed miserably, by the way – last year. Then we said, “Meh, nothing ever seems to do well in this bed, it must be too shady or whatever, HEY, I KNOW! Let’s make it the compost bed!!

…and then the white potatoes went, Hey, waitasecond, I KNOW WHAT WE FORGOT TO DO LAST YEAR!

There were a lot more of them, but guess what? Cutworms + Earwigs + Borers, oh my! We have an infestation that is bordering on Biblical in proportions, actually; you night notice some white powdery stuff sprinkled all over the place in these pictures – it’s diatomaceous earth. Hopefully, it will give my poor plants a chance to survive.

We also have some ‘surprise’ Blue Nile potatoes. Again, our yields last year were extremely “meh” on those…but by golly, I missed a couple.



I’m very curious to see how these do, yield-wise. The ones I missed had to be pretty darned small, and generally you want to use your “best” ones for seed potatoes.

Sticking with potatoes, we’ll jump inside for a second so I can show you The Potato Posse:



These are Pontiac red and Russet potatoes, two of each. Aren’t they awesome?! They all started out like this one…



…which is apparently a slow-bloomer or something, and I’ve been building up their dirt as they’ve grown. When the weather has become more stable, I’ll go ahead and (gently) move these out along the front walkway to greet people…they make beautiful houseplants, though, don’t they?!

Meanwhile, back in the back-back-back, the blackberries are actually starting to resemble the beginnings of a bramble.



The bing cherry is going to town, baby!



…unfortunately, it’s pollinating side-kick the Ranier…isn’t as happy.



Looks like half of the grafting didn’t take; it had blossoms on the “live” side, but not a whole-whole lot of them. I went out one night and did some by-hand pollinating – running my hands over the Ranier blossoms and then over the Bing – hoping to increase the chances of getting actual cherries this year. We’ll see.

The apple tree, meanwhile, is just a happy little low-maintenance bloomer:



And this? This is probably going to be leaving this year.



The Denizens don’t play on it anymore, really; it’s designed for smaller children, so it’s hard for them to get onto it. And their tastes have moved on, really.

Plus they don’t do bugs. And there are a lot of bugs out there.

Once it is gone, the husband wants to put another shed back there for his woodworking tools and such; and of course, I’m planning to snatch up every remaining inch of ground for more gardening space. Because of course I am.

Out in the front, I was going to dig out and move the blueberries, because they just aren’t happy in that under-the-front-window spot; it’s too shady, I guess.



Yeah…pathetic. And right up front, too! But then, well, this happened.



We might actually get a handful of berries off these this year! So, I’m going to leave them alone for this season, and move them after they’ve finished bearing whatever they deign to produce.

The front boxes are 2/3 empty right now.



In the very front, I’ve got some bell peppers coming up:


Can you even see the sprouts? They’re tiny…

The middle one had beets, but the anti-cat-wire you can see standing up there was left on too long and I had to yank them all out. There a couple onions still manfully bulbing in it, but it’s mostly empty for now.

And the back one has yet more potatoes in it; one of them was apparently eaten to death and the other is not doing well either. I may have to redo the whole box.

Let’s see…who did I forget…oh! The mushroom forest!



…which doesn’t look like mushrooms, or a forest. These are logs which are (hopefully) being inoculated with mushroom plugs – lion’s mane, shiitake and oyster mushrooms. In Due Course, we should start have mushrooms sticking out all over these things. It’s a new thing for us, soooooooo…no idea if we’ve done it right or if it’s going to work.

The relocated cranberries are much happier in their new spot.



New growth! Yay!

And, here’s the final spot of dirt that is about to get planted…



This strip is notoriously difficult; it’s kind of the “oh yeah, and” spot, where we forget to watch whether enough water is happening and so forth. It gets moderate sun…enough for things that aren’t wicked demanding on that front, but not anything like “full-full.” So, right now I’m sprouting some yams and sweet potatoes, and I’ll plant one side with the one and the other with the other.

We had thumping MASSIVE yields from the sweet potatoes I planted last year, but they were also a major pain in the tush back there in the regular “field” area; you had to stay way on top of them, or they would take over the whole blasted yard!

I figure that back on these strips, hemmed in by concrete, they can go nuts all they like; I don’t think they’ll be able to hop the concrete and get into each other’s business, nor can they choke the lettuce to death. Their vines are an attractive ‘ground cover’ like deal while growing, too, which would be nice back here.

Is that everybody? I think it is.

And now, it’s getting noisy in here – I think I’m safe to start making with the day’s chores. Which hey, guess what?! Involve a fair amount of gardening! Go figure!!!

Spring has sprung; the earth is warming up, the birds are chirping, the bugs are invading, the sprouts are sprouting…and suddenly, I am again a busy little ant, scurrying and hurrying to get everything done before winter comes again.

Lord, how I’ve missed it!

…and, bets on how long before I’m griping about it…?

Buttons, Honor and Wasted Effort

The husband and I rode back a few stations last night so that we could get seats together.

Then we promptly gave them up to an elderly couple and stood almost all the way.

...stupid sense of honor and decency...why can't you let me be like all those young, healthy people sitting in the seats labeled, "Reserved for disabled and elderly persons...Federal law requires that these seats be surrendered to elderly and disabled passengers"?!

Sigh. Oh well. Back-ride effort wasted. Back and hip requiring increased levels of pain medication last night (and apparently today too...meg...).

But sense of honor and decency intact.

In other news, I finished the main body of the hoodie this morning! Woo hoo!

...but, change of plans, I must use buttons, not a zipper. The Captain hath informed me that a zipper is a non-starter for him.

I still don't know why; he was being VERY autistic about it, walking around in an agitated circle muttering about zippers and bees and jackets and honey and Animusic videos and candy and pennies and could he pway a game-UH on mah TAB-uh-WET?

...which means he doesn't know how to say what he's thinking, and is frustrated by this but ARGH, why can't you just READ MY MIND...?!

Poor baby...autism is so unfair, sometimes...he's not 'retarded', there us NOTHING wrong with his logical processes and frankly, I suspect that inside his head, he can talk like a politician...but when those thoughts need to be spoken, the whole system just locks up and crashes.

Ah well. Laptop is booted - time to work! I have a lot of fun analysis on tap today...is it even allowed to enjoy your job this much?!?!

Do they make teflon pants?

Googly is coming along nicely. The nice thing about Ye Olde Stockinette is the speed...you can just rip right along without a whole lot of FEAR when you're on the straight up 'knit the whole row, turn and purl your way back...repeat ad-infinitum until you are ready to claw your eyeballs out, or the piece measures X inches, whichever comes first...

HOWEVER...I have a slight problem with this yarn.

It. Sheds.

Like crazy-mad. And the downy fuzz CLINGS to whatever it touches.

Like, say, MY PANTS. It did it to a new pair jeans earlier this week and freaked me out...Gah, what's this yellowish-green stuff, did I get chalk on myself or something?!

No, just cotton yarn fuzz. Which would NOT be brushed off but required a lint-roller to remove.

And what am I wearing today?

Black corduroys.

I look like I've been...walking through a Sidewalk Chalk Zone or something...feh...do they make teflon-coated pants? 'Cause I think I need some while finishing up this project....

Link to Article: Home Organization

This was in my Slate Stretcher email this morning; it is something I learned years and years ago.

Organization, that to fine art of 'everything having a place, and everything IN its place', is more than just a sanity-saver when you need to find something. It saves you cold, hard cash, too!
This is also and excellent website in general, by the way - practical frugal-living advice and articles. One of my Frequent Reads.

Link to article:
Home Organization