A Longish Update: Compost, Baby Shower, and Dreams

Today is definitely a stay in bed and read sort of day. I've had a headache since waking up yesterday, one of those strangely defiant aches that doesn't seem affected by the normal pain medications. Yesterday it eventually developed into nausea and vertigo, and I had to drive in the terrible rainstorms to get home from work. Blinded every couple of minutes by massive flashes of lightning, otherwise incapable of seeing much more than the lights of the car ahead of me, and seriously wondering if the mass of water running over the highway might be enough to sweep away the truck...Yeah, it was not a nice drive.

Still, complaining about rain does not feel like the thing to do, with the lake at 38% capacity after years of hard drought. It's just that we no longer have any idea how to deal with rainfall, particularly not heavy rainfall, and there are news reports that maybe our dams aren't as up to snuff as they ought to be, and being next door to Louisiana that makes me nervous. I want my dams and levies functioning properly, you know?

Anyways...It's raining just in time to sweep away my new food-waste collection site. Darling and I decided to do a compost pile, but since we might not be at this house for more than a couple of months longer we want to a 38-Day Berkley method pile. This requires having a certain amount of food waste (and other "green matter) as well as brown matter and manure to start...basically, having all of your ingredients at once, rather than adding it as you get it as with traditional backyard piles. That "certain amount," is a rather large amount, so I built a small bin just for that, for the time being. I also cleaned up the massive amount of brush and yard debris that has been sitting in the back since the house was purchased. It took about five hours and, two days later, I'm still sore as I've ever been. But the backyard is looking very good.

That's how I spent one of my first days off this week. The second day off was spent with my little sister making baby shower invitations. That's going to be in a couple of weeks and I'll be hosting that. Very excited and nervous. I am typically not a girlie girl sort of girl, but I want this to be super-special for my Lenore.

Darling: still working his butt off, still doing well. And I still wait for some agent to jump out from behind a bush and shout, "the jig is up! put your hands up and step away from your dreams-come-true." Seriously, it's like a sickness with me, I'm still too nervous to believe that this job is real, that Darling has a good job and it's only going to get better, that everything we've worked for these past five years is actually happening. Do you understand that I had given up? Darling's been working over a month now, driving himself to-and-from work for weeks now, earning great pay, saving, ticking items off of our priority list, enjoying his boss and coworkers, and I am still waiting for everything to fall apart. I still haven't accepted this new, beautiful reality.

The saving is cool, too. We're anxious about taxes, because he'll be a contract employee for a while (maybe when he's made permanent I'll be able to relax). We've never had to pay taxes before, because I'm a big fan of letting them take a chunk out of every paycheck and then giving it back to me in February, but this year or 2014 might be different. So we're taking 25% out of each of his checks and sticking it in a savings account, and every six weeks we should be able to invest in a share certificate at our credit union. The interest rates are pitiful, but better than nothing and certainly better than not having any money to pay taxes with should it ever come to that. I'm over-estimating what we should expect to pay in the hopes, of course, that the money will turn into an emergency fund. And having it in share certificates will prevent me from treating Christmas like an emergency.

Partnership and Priorities

We're so very funny, my Darling and me together. For most of last week we were ships passing in the night - or rather, in the early morning, him gone about half an hour before I arrive, the scent of his breakfast still hanging in the air as I got ready for bed- and then we had a desperately coveted, too-short Saturday together. We enjoyed a sleepy date night, not going out to eat but not exactly making the pasta or sauce from scratch, either. Then Sunday morning I made breakfast and edged my way out of the house to the workshop, leaving him to do whatever it is he does with his time. I came home to a clean kitchen, promised to do my part the next day, and we fell into bed...

Then today weather and permitting issues have him working at home, and it's like having my territory invaded. I'm no longer in the mood for cuddles, pumpkins, or wine. I have to get back to the workshop today, then a shift tonight, and then my sister and I are having a special day tomorrow, the details I have not exactly worked out as of yet. Maybe today I will finally get to the back lawn. There have been so many days that I've felt happy and excited to do it, but not managed to get back there, that perhaps now is the time to make myself get it done.

We wrote a priority list together. It's been a goodly long time, too, and had forgotten some of the little rules and practices we used to have. Darling, as ever, was cute and picked out all of "my" priorities: my sister's baby shower gift, the special day trip I also want to give my sister, some new bits and pieces for my wardrobe. In the past I would have tried to balance that out or talked him into making more reasonable choices, but this time around I just let him make his call and in the end insisted only that we put getting a new brake light for the truck a little higher on this list. Calling his bluff, so to speak, and sure enough the past week he has sort of hinted we should skip ahead on the priority list...skip his first choices, basically :) That's one thing I've learned about sharing finances these past nine years: it sucks for one person to have to be the adult, to veto fun purchases, and determine what is and isn't reasonable.

The coolest thing about the list right now is the ease of covering big ticket items with Darling's paychecks while meeting daily needs with my income. Come next month I will be able to schedule eye exams and dental appointments again :)

Organization/Lowering Standards

My thoughts this week have been on housekeeping. This is an area in which I entirely lack anything approaching expertise. For the past three years, managing a home was a group effort in which my own contribution varied greatly but mostly centered around a support and maintenance role. At the cooperative, I would cook large dinner, bake hearty loaves of bread, and prepare granola from scratch, inspiring grateful roommates to wash the dishes, sweep the floors, and dust the cabinets (or whatever). When the washing machine broke, I replaced the motor. When adolescent chickens in the living room threatened household sanity as well as sanitation, I built the coop. I did my own dishes, and washed up when other people cooked, did my weekly rotating chore, and everything balanced out nicely.

My ultimate conclusion is that it is silly to live alone. But that's what Darling and I do right now. My back-up conclusion would be that, should two people have to run a household together, that either both ought to work part-time and manage the house together or one person should earn while the other cares for the home. That's how we were getting on before Darling got his job, but that's not longer a possibility. Not because we couldn't afford to live on one income, but because I love both my job and my side business and I'm not walking away from either for the time being.

This leaves me to the matter of organization, as Lizzie advised. I've also found it necessary to simply lower my standards to a manageable level, and avoid repetition. The daily to-do list has boiled down to its limited basics: wash dishes and do laundry. That list is maybe only seriously tackled three days a week, with Darling filling in the gaps when I'm too exhausted by my own job or errands to wipe down the kitchen sink.

Pumpkin Patch

 I love fall. Fall feels to me, and many Texans, like Fall must feel to many parts of the country. A cool breeze breaks the 3+ months of overwhelming heat, rains come, everything comes back to life. The second growing season brings broccoli, kale, spinach, and the numerous other veggies that couldn't survive even shaded Summer days. Our citrus begins to come in, avocados get cheaper, and the mosquitoes recede.

Riding my bike yesterday, I passed a big beautiful pumpkin patch at the Methodist church. After working a double shift, struggling to find a way home on Saturday morning (Darling came and picked me up, but I insisted on making my way to north Austin first, so as to save at least a little gas), and arriving home after working and travelling nearly twenty-four straight hours, all I could think is that I wanted to go back to that beautiful collection of gourds and take home one (or a dozen) of my very own.
I might have gone a little overboard. Silly with sleep deprivation and simple childish delight, I picked out a massive pumpkin and insisted Darling pick out one equally impressive, and then we got a couple of little guys to bake into pie (though I don't think they're technically pie pumpkins, they're a far sight better than the re-purposed jack-o-lanterns I used to rescue from people's trash on November 1st.

Look at that handsome man. You know, he's been working for a full month. He's out of the house before dawn, home after dusk, refuses to drink anything stronger than a single cider on weekdays, instigated a complete shift in the company's policy on safety equipment that resulted in a much safer environment for his crew...hell, the man has a crew. My pride is unbearable, my pride feels like Fall. My pride asks a question, "what's next?" My pride looks me in the face and wonders how I intend to step up and meet my husband in his metamorphosis, how to support him in his new role, and how to shed the layers of myself that are no longer necessary.

Paranoia, cynicism, doubt, anxiety...the four horsemen of my personal apocalypse. When I'm not careful, they gain ground and I'm half convinced the world is coming to an end, that this great happiness my husband experiencing is as fragile as blown glass and will shatter at any moment. "And then what?" the question takes a darker tone, a tone that feels like endings instead of beginnings, a tone that makes life seem to have a beginning, a middle, and an end instead of a steady flow of cycles that feeds itself for eternity.

Today I rest on that pride, and her sisters: hope, trust, and faith. Today I endeavor to see the full cycle. Today I fight to experience the moment. Today, I picked a long skinny pumpkin, and a big fat pumpkin, and two little pumpkins. Tonight I buy a bottle of wine, and toast to beginnings, most particularly the late ones.

Another Small Debt Paid

Was family dinner a success? It's hard to say, not so much because of anything I could control but because the human's involved...well, our clan struggles at everything mundane. For instance, my Mom got lost on the way to the house. When I asked what road she was, she absolutely insisted that she was, "you know, just on, like, a road." Finally convinced to take a step back from her zen outlook of being lost and promising to report the next street sign, so I could work out where she was and get her home, she proudly announced, "Oh, there's one, '45 mph.'"

So, yeah. There was family and there was dinner, and what more can you really ask for? I had a good time. Afterward I took Mom down to the workshop and she picked out her dulcimer. Oh! I also wrote her a giant check to pay for the truck insurance and her car insurance. All thanks to Darling's paycheck, which finally arrived.

I promised to write that check some point last year, and nursed a mounting anxiety about it until yesterday. Being able to write that check inspired, to a certain degree, continuing to work at the restaurant instead of tackling the instrument business full-time. It inspired a certain quiet resentment when it didn't seem Darling was as diligent as possible in seeking work. It inspired poor choices. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to have the truck. I own that in myself now, and I'm not going to fight it anymore. The truck has made my way of life possible. But the cost has been severe, and it's such a relief to have finally written that check. I didn't realize the burden I was carrying until I woke up this morning, and my very first thoughts weren't of stress and anxiety.

It felt like writing the last check I owed my school, my lawyer, and my sister-in-law, the first three big debts I paid off before all of my energy went towards student loans. Paying the insurance represents, in a big way, paying a small debt owed to my Mom, though I didn't think of it that way until needing words to describe the relief.

It reminds me that financial freedom will feel good. It reminds me that not all obligations are perpetual.

Maybe I'm just sentimental because it's fall, my husband is working, and it's raining cats and dogs in Texas.

Erma Bombecked

Today I ran around the house like a parody of a housewife. There is so much I don't know quite how to do. Like the piles of laundry I tackle ever few days, inspired by Darling's one good work shirt to iron the lot of it. I stare and twist at the blue jeans like a two-dimensional rubics cube, trying to work out how to make the buggers lie flat. I race out the front door when upon hearing the garbage truck, dragging our over-sized bin to the curb as though we couldn't fit a month's worth of garbage into it easily. Back inside, I realize that I twisted my hair out of my face and pinned it to the top of my head, making me look something like a demented citizen of Whoville. Dishes and laundry are literally never finished, battles that can't possibly be won. I realize belatedly I don't have a container for the precious stock simmering on the stove. I realize daily that getting to cleaning the floors is going to take an act of God. Mowing the front lawn was a major coup. Today I finally mopped, and, amazingly, mopped myself into a corner. Am I really this inept?

I'm  a little more frantic today because I'm having family over for the first time since moving to suburbia. So the kitchen needed to be pristine, the pantry stocked, the floors clean. I drew the blinds against the atrocity of the backyard, from which even the snails seem desperate to escape, judging by the numbers I evicted from under my couch and around the door frame. I vacuumed, scrubbed the toilet, and...well, I closed my bedroom door.

Since my mom and her boyfriend arrived I've set dough to rise for a pizza crust and baked chocolate chip banana muffins. They slipped off to the shop just now, giving me the first time to sit down since I woke up. All told, I'm relatively pleased with myself. The house looks a little better than decent, and smells delicious. Now just to make the bed. Though at this stage I could curl up under the dinner table and sleep for a week :)

Lost and Found

I just found a hundred dollar bill that I lost some time over the weekend. It was a terrible experience, one of those cases in which I knew exactly where it was and it wasn't there. And, of course, the Darling light of my life insisted he had never seen it, even though I had told him to put it in his pocket at one point, and guess where it was???

Whew. It's a relief to have it in my possession again. Money is flowing away at a fast enough rate without literally disappearing into thin air.

I've harped on enough about my $160 phone payment, and resulting freedom from phone bills for the rest of the year, but that and the missing $100 were making me feel as though my doubled workload last week had no positive effect whatsoever. Now it feels like the burden has been lifted twice over.

Train Freedom

Oh my, this past week.

There are times I look back on in my life as particularly defining. Bits and pieces, rarely entire days but certain practices that I recall and say, "yeah, I was doing well back then, even if I didn't know it." Any time or place I was picking fresh fruit, for whatever reason, was a good time. Whether plucking the blackberries of my childhood, the strawberries I picked to help pay for college, the apples I scrounged the first couple of years of my marriage, or the blueberries I plucked last year along Lake Michigan, I was most certainly at the right place at the right time. I feel the same way about gardening, knitting on cold winter mornings, preserving food, and riding my bike and public transportation.

Last Tuesday evening I mounted my trusty steed and made the fifteen-minute bike ride to the transit hub in Leander. From there I caught a bus, reading my Kindle and chatting with the driver to downtown Austin, whence I rode the fifteen minutes to the diner. Come dawn, I clocked out of work, rode my bike to the train station, leaned tiredly against the mount and started the next chapter of my book until arriving back in Leander, and rode the rest of the way home. The way home took significantly longer, being up hill and at the end of a long day.

When I woke up at five thirty that afternoon, I definitely experienced bitterness to have to roll out of bed and do the whole thing over again immediately. The lengthy commute extended my workday hideously. But I did it, and this time rode home much more easily come seven in the morning. That's the great thing about riding the bike: only 24 hours, a couple of meals, and seven hours of sleep was all it took to build enough muscle to make an impossible ride a fairly difficult ride. Not only did I do the ride this time without walking the bike at all, but I went shopping on the way home and rode home the groceries on the bike!

Not that all was well in paradise. In all the excitement of working, commuting, and sleeping, by Thursday evening I hadn't even seen Darling since Monday morning. So he arranged for me to have the truck to get to work that evening. That night I cooked dinner, washed laundry, swept the floors, and then went to work. By the time I started my shift it occurred to me that I might prefer the three hour commute with reading time over three hours extra space to do chores!

Much more to say about next week, but I think the commute was the coolest. Missed the bike riding home Saturday morning, but was grateful to have the truck getting home today during the crazy flash flooding. So good to be playing with car-freedom again!

Domesticky

Having my phone bill all paid up through February makes me feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy inside, even if it has me counting out change to toss into the gas tank. I picked up some extra shifts this week to help round things out a little, and Darling's company truck is needed in Dallas, so he'll be taking my Mom's truck to work and I'll be taking the bus into town for at least the next three days. Heck, I could even take the bus on Friday, and he could come into town to pick me up on Saturday morning.

Darling should get his first paycheck this Friday, which will make our financial life so significantly better I can scarcely think of it. Darling's job still feels way too good to be true. Another week after the check and he'll have been there a month, so maybe then I'll be able to relax into my role as secondary earner. And then...housewife?

Seeing to his needs does have me working a lot more around the house and opening my eyes to our domestic needs and possibilities. I'm cooking more than I have for months, and, having cycled through many of my tried-and-true recipes, have been trolling the Internet for new meal ideas. Yesterday was very garlicky cooked spinach over spaghetti noodles. I've been washing and line-drying the laundry, and ironing his long-sleeved cotton work shirts. I spent most of one day sorting out the kitchen, which makes it feel so much more ours. Yesterday I baked three large, billowy loaves of bread, and I have a home-made pie crust waiting to be filled with lemon meringue. So, yeah, that's where my time is going these days.

Today: too beautiful and cool to stay inside, it's time to mow the lawn. Then more sleep, since I'll be riding my bike to the bus stop and working overnight :)

Buying Phone In Bulk

This weekend I made a tough call and determined to spend all of my money in one place.

I've been wanting to take advantage of a deal Cricket offers since buying my phone last spring. When one pays three months upfront, one gets the fourth month free. This knocks my monthly bill to about $40 a month after taxes, which justifies, to my mind, the high price of a smart phone.

It was only a matter of saving $161, but for some reason I never managed to do so by the time the next bill was due. That's life, but it's an atrocious thing to know that I could have saved $100 by now with a little thought and effort. That's why I finally took the plunge on Saturday, even though it means having to scrape along for the rest of this week. I still needed gas in the truck, the week's groceries, and some bits and pieces for Darling's tool bag.

The Truck Talk

This morning I came home from work and made Darling and omelette, green smoothie, and cup of coffee. By the time he was up, showered, and dressed, I was tucked into bed myself. He kissed me goodbye and drove himself to work.

I woke up just after noon after too little sleep, filled with nervous energy. I washed laundry and hung it to dry, put my collection of veggie ends and onion peels to simmer into stock, and cleaned and organized the kitchen. I took the truck to have the oil changed and considered running more errands but lost my nerve and hurried home. By 5:00 pm I was rushing to the window at every slight noise heard outside, and, eventually, my husband pulled into the driveway.

Do you have any idea how weird that statement sounds to me? My husband pulled into the driveway. This change has had an inexplicably massive impact on my life. My husband, fully independent, and how I feel about that has given me enormous insight on my own modes of behavior. I wasn't ready for it. My husband, in a leadership position at work, doing well, and me...just not really knowing how to cope. This doesn't feel possible. And yet, it is such a simple thing that I can't communicate this depth of emotion to anyone I know.

In my attempt, I hear something unexpected in my story. Another radical shift in my perspective, and it's this: I live in suburbia, and we have a two-truck household. Holy crap. Also, I buy groceries at a regular old grocery store. And I've been washing my hair with mass-produced bottled shampoo.

Huh.

So I laughed when I read Anne's last comment. Why yes, yes I am bothered by having two trucks, despite my dedication to owning NO vehicle, even though technically I don't own them. Especially since I use these trucks like crazy.

I've written recently about permaculture, and the Prime Directive, and about rationalizations. So you and I both know that I can justify the driving. Darling's truck empowers him to install solar panels for a living. By earning a living, we can begin to invest in products and practices that will make our own lives more sustainable. No truck, no job...and we could live with that, but my husband is 48 years old. I can get away with riding a bike with my teddy bear and a cape for another few years, but Darling's lifestyle choices are taking an air of permanence to them. If his career demands driving a company truck (necessary for transporting heavy construction equipment, ladders, and safety devices), can I really argue that?

Yeah, rationalizations. As for my (Mom's) truck...

You want to hear a story? A few weeks ago I applied for a job nearby and was hired on the spot. There are a number of good things to be said for the bistro that hired me to wait tables, including the possibility of a car-free commute. I slept on the decision, and decided to turn the job down. Because I'm happy at the diner, and I can't say that about many of the jobs I quit. Also, because I sorely miss the union, think about it every day, and couldn't hold that sorrow for a second set of coworkers. So the truck, the commute, the diner...I'm doing it all for selfish reasons. I don't complain about traffic anymore. 

It was the very next day that Darling was offered his job. Had I kept the second job and quit the diner, and would therefore have not been working nights, he wouldn't have been able to get to work long enough to be offered the company truck. So there's that version of a happy ending. Then again, we could have been a zero truck household instead of a one-truck household. We would have had two more regrets and two fewer trucks. I'm not saying we made the right choice, but we made the choice.

My husband drove himself to work and back today, and that changed our relationship on a very deep level. After nearly nine years of marriage, we don't experience such developmental surges often. I hate to admit that I think this single change has had as much an impact on us as six months of bike-touring last year did.

Not that I'm planning on resting on my laurels now that we have become a two-truck household. See, this situation actually invites new and exciting advancements. According to my mission statement, if Darling and I are every to buy a vehicle, we are to buy the most environmentally friendly one on the market. Ever since making that decision, I have wondered how to make that call, or afford that vehicle without credit.

I've toyed with the idea of biodiesel for a long time. Biodiesel vehicles are imperfect, but have the following traits:

* Older diesel trucks are usually pretty heavy-duty and are affordable in this area second-hand because of sky-rocketing gas prices. Buying one second hand will help prevent it from heading towards the landfill. Buying a new car, on the other hand, even a purely super-awesome electric, would mean investing in the production of fresh industrial waste and pollution.

* Diesel is expensive and causes pollution, and so is biodiesel. Biodiesel, however, can be processed at home. Biodiesel is also a biological resource, however you may feel about King Corn. I don't feel good about King Corn, by the way, but I'm not too hot on Big Oil or mountain-top removal, either. Biodiesel provides the opportunity to recycle and favor biological resources.

* Biodiesel engines are, I believe, a transitional technology. Ethan Hughes taught me about this at the Possibility Alliance. Transitional technologies are those that withstand the test of time in terms of changes in resource abundance or scarcity. E-mail may or may not exist in a future that depends on non-renewable rare earth metals to operate (photovoltaic cells have the same exact flaw, by the way). Mail, however, has existed for a very long time and will probably continue to exist, regardless of government funding. Biodiesel engines are fairly simple, particularly compared to an electric engine, and could be repaired and worked on in my driveway.

The only thing that's prevented me from jumping on the biodiesel bandwagon was my hesitation in buying a vehicle that Darling would refuse to drive. Now that he's driving a diesel truck whether he likes it or not, we're much more likely to head in this direction so as to rely on a single single affordable mode of transportation. 

Happy News

The excitement regarding Open Enrollment has been suddenly and totally overshadowed by a new development in the Softly Household: Darling has a truck.

As previously mentioned, a few months ago Darling got a call out of the blue by a company wanting him for a supervisory position. Based on Darling's age and experience, this was a reasonable thing to expect. As is our practice with any other job, Darling answered "yes" to all questions regarding transportation. We had this habit even when we personally defined "reliable transportation" as having two feet and a bus pass, even for jobs taking place twelve-hour drives away from home. We always made this work.

Well, Darling didn't apply for the supervisor position, but he was hired. Eventually they even put him to work. I didn't enjoy waking up at seven a.m. to drive him to work, nor did I enjoy coming home at six a.m. from work to drive him to work. But it never even occurred to me that there could be another way. See, Darling doesn't drive very much or often, and there's no way that I'm going to be without transportation while he's off with the truck. That's just how it is, and don't worry, I'm very ashamed of myself for it. There's obviously some very deep psychological issues at play, and I don't care to face them...ever.

Except today there was a company truck on the worksite, and Darling went to great lengths working out how to deal with the vehicle and store it safely overnight before realizing that the truck was for him. To drive. To and from work. Gas covered by the company. A big old truck.

Hello, Issues. I'll tackle you later. Soon, but later.

In the meantime: Yay! Darling has transportation to and from work! I can work late and sleep in! He has independence, an independence that neither of us even thought to hope for! And this company must love him and want to keep him forever, give him raises, great health insurance, and eventually a pension!

No Healthcare, and The Thin Man

As a child I had a recurring nightmare, every Christmas Eve, that Santa did not come that night. Nuerotic, much? Anyway, that's not exactly how my Open Enrollment Day felt, but it's pretty darn close.

I was online most of the day, experiencing much the same issues reported by the general public. The security question fields were blank, and the "live chat" was non-responsive. Later in the evening I finally created an account, or at least got the confirmation e-mail, but still couldn't log on. In the meantime, I consumed as much media as possible regarding the Healthcare exchanges and the glitches, but was amazed at how little publicity seems focused on OE Day. Far, far more articles have been written in the past 24 hours about Texas sports, according to Google News, than Texas health care.

I've indulged in way too much media in my search for answers. I think a lot of us just want to know if anyone else is having the same experience. Then I want to know if anyone isn't. Has anyone out there actually managed to make this website work?


I keep wanting to trash talk the Republican sort of folk who fought the Health care Act so fiercely, but it just doesn't seem worth the space. It doesn't take much thought to point at the jumbled mass of idiotic contradictions that they're STILL touting on talk radio and say, "hey, you're stupid." So, I won't.

Instead...

Why Our Grocery Budget Doubles When Darling Works

Once upon a time, Darling and I had a $20 weekly grocery budget. Back then I scrumped apples from a tree on the way to a laundromat and worked on a farm for our vegetables. The day after Halloween I would nab the best looking pumpkins dragged to the curb and make pumpkin pie with the salvage. We dumpster dove in the most crude sense of the word, not knowing how to do so properly. We were broke. 

Later, in Austin, our grocery budget balanced. I've talked about all that, and I've also mentioned that most recently Darling and I economize by purchasing conventional groceries from the nearest store. We spend about $50 a week to maintain a relatively sedentary lifestyle. From what I can tell, this is not a lot of money for two people. It's a lot of dried beans, pasta, and veggies such us carrots, cabbage, and broccoli.

Darling is one of those very tall, lean, hungry men. When he works, he builds muscle very quickly and grows much hungrier. The more he works, the more muscle he puts on, and he gets sick very easily if he does not consume a great deal more calories to keep up. His last job he put on twenty pounds of muscle. Not an ounce of fat, which is actually quite dangerous and impairs his immune system.

In order stay hydrated in the Texas heat, he also needs about five times more salt than the average person. So, when he's working construction, we buy the convenience foods we typically eschew, purposely seeking out foods high in salt, fat, and protein. We purchase vegan meat products for sandwiches and buy him big bags of salted nuts. We buy more fruit, more cheese, tortilla chips, and I stop skimping on the eggs. Because my goal is to put as many calories in him as possible, I also buy orange juice and almond milk when he works.

You can imagine this does nothing good for my own waistline, but that's another post...

...Oh yes, one last thing: Debbie e-mailed me and mentions I might have an issue with my comments. They do seem to take at least a day to show up on my blog, so I think I'm going to relax some of the restrictions I put up when spam was an issue to see if that helps. Thanks for the heads up!

October 2013 Net Worth

So. Shall we talk about the downside? The downside of, er, everything?

-$2,325.36. That is my net worth. I can't quite wrap my head around that number. I did the math, did it again, and then wondered at my math the past couple of months. How did this plummet so suddenly, so helplessly?

My spending actually decreased somewhat substantially in September, by over $400. And the money I did spend was done carefully. Darling and I didn't eat out, I gave up coffee shops, and went another month without beer. The first couple of weeks in the month were especially successful: I saved money, and I sent a little more money to debt and knocked the total I owe to student loans to less than $1,600. So what happened?

Things went a little mad when Darling was told to be at the work site. Maybe I didn't realize just how mad. Our grocery bill doubled this month, from $200 to $400. I bought a second phone, a cheap pay-as-you go, but still a chunk of change. We spent about a hundred dollars outfitting him with new tools and some new clothes...But even now, even looking at the numbers, it's hard to really believe the reality.

It's when I shift my focus from spending to earning that things make sense. In September, Darling and I "tightened our belts," so to speak, spending more on work clothes and whole foods but cutting out luxury and entertainment items. Again, despite our excess, we did cut spending by $400. The problem? Our income dropped $400 too! We earned exactly as much less as we spent!

September is supposed to be a slow month at the diner, so I should have seen it coming. But how could I have imagined spending $100 less a week? Earning less hurts us more than spending less helps us. Some expenses, particularly gas and rent, have stayed fairly constant over the past few months. Other expenses fluctuate but can't be ignored. In the end, a hit to our earnings resulted in a plummeting net worth, as I drained my savings to try and pay a rent I'm still behind on.

Bah. I can't let this get me down. Instead, I'm just going to have to be satisfied that October will be significantly better. In two weeks, Darling will bring home his first paycheck and turn this financial situation completely around once and for all.

Open Enrollment Day!

Oh man, how long have I been waiting for today? Years! Today the Affordable Health Care Act - well, the insurance exchange part - comes into affect! Open enrollment! Choices, possibility, affordability!

Healthcare.gov must be absolutely swamped, because I've tried to access it a number of times using two different machines, and have had no luck. I'll get to a certain point in starting an account, and things just stop functioning properly, and I'm told to try again later. If I lived in a state that wasn't run by the Batshitcrazy, dog-shooting, Presidential Would-be Rick Perry (yes, the man shot someone's dog. On a jogging trail. While he was jogging. He KILLED SOMEONE'S DOG and then RAN FOR PRESIDENT!!! How did that not completely destroy his career - never mind his eleven million other completely insane characteristics?), ahem, if I lived in any other state, there might be some other way to access information regarding today's health care breakthrough, but Perry has done his absolute best to restrict information and those who could provide it...so, yeah, I'm stuck with healthcare.gov. Open enrollment largely affects citizens who don't receive health care through their employers, which accounts for 50% of Texans, so I'm sure it will just be a crazy few weeks while short-staffed, underfunded, over-regulated, and largely non-profit agencies try and handle the flood of applicants.

From playing with healthcare.gov weeks ago, however, I happen to know that Darling and I most likely qualify for Medicare. So maybe I'll just check them out, for now, and see if that site is functioning properly at this time...I'll keep you updated. Is anyone else having fun with today's changes?

***EDIT***

I wrestled with the website for hours and, thanks to the government shutdown, affiliated websites aren't much more help. Gave up at around three in the afternoon, came back to it this evening, and it's still wonky. At least it's wonky in a different way, so they must be working on it...Lots of scary fake websites out there, too. If you Google Affordable Healthcare Act, or even "Medicare" or "Medicaid," don't assume that the first handful of sites that pop up are anything besides scams. Make sure it has a .gov at the end. Lots and lots of misinformation out there today! At least I've had some time to meditate on copay options and read about deductions.