Tag: me

Hallelujah!

I’ve been putting money into a savings account to fund an emergency fund of three months of living expenses for more than 10 years. The emergency fund has been depleted time and again over the years, mostly because of emergencies. There have also been periods of employment where I could only save $25.00 per month. When you are shooting for $5100 in savings, depositing $25.00 per month can be particularly disheartening.

Still I persisted. And this month, I’m proud to say that I have reached my emergency fund’s first goal. Yip-yip-yipee! My next goal will be to have six months of living expenses in the bank.

What should I do to celebrate? Perhaps buy a pony?

Kidding. I’ll probably read another personal finance book.

Sun!

Friday, I was exhausted. “You would think,” I told one of my colleagues, “that I had worked 40 hours this week and done six interviews and a kindergarten roundup. However, due to my 32 hour a week work schedule and several conflicts, I did none of them. Still, I could hardly motivate myself to get to the ballet Friday night. When I came home, I was the kind of tired where it seems like a better option to sit on the couch and stare at the wall because going to be takes to much energy.

Saturday was a different matter. I woke up remarkably refreshed–a well rested rising being a rare occurrence in my life. I went to the gym, did laundry, hung it to dry, harvested some greens and radish from the backyard, cooked and ate them, spent several hours alternating through homework and planting root vegetables in the garden, folded and put away all of my laundry and hung out with Matt. All with a level of energy I haven’t had in forever.

It was the sun. Yesterday the sun shown all day. It was warm, and promised of summer. The vegetable beds dried out. The mustard plant flowered. The asparagus shot up. The cilantro threatened to bolt. It warmed my back as I was planting seeds and Matt came back from his bike ride with a sunburn.

It rained all of May. If you live in Portland, you know what I mean. It rains a lot here, yes, but this rain was persistently nasty and cold. I’ve only worn sandals once this year. My summer clothes sit in a box under my bed. There is threat that the strawberries will rot in the field, if it doesn’t warm up. We’ve had a month solid of March rain, with its reminders of winter, rather than May rain, with its promise of summer. Today it is raining again. I think I’ll be okay, thanks to that one glorious day of sun.

Getting out of bed.

I very rarely have problems getting out of bed in the morning. Most of the time, I wake up before my alarm and I get up and go about my day. Even on the weekends I don’t tend to linger in bed in the morning. But the afternoon? That’s an entirely different story. When not working, I tend to get sleepy after lunch and I lay down “for just a little bit.” Getting up after that “little bit” is a Herculean task and the bit sometimes stretches to a good two hours or so. I nap and read and generally do anything possible to avoid getting up. “Just five more minutes” I plead to myself.

In that ideal life, which I think I can find by locating the city on the hill, I would not need a nap. But in this life, I do.

Savings Bond

Back in November of 1974, someone was excited about my birth and bought me a $25.00 savings bond. I’m 35 now, and that savings bond matured some time ago. It is worth about $130.00, which is a lot, but that weird amount, where I don’t want to cash it and spend it on something like groceries, but also it needs to be spent on something special, so I can point to it and say, “my savings bond bought that.” I’ve been hemming and hawing for years as to what to use it for.

It has finally come to me: I’m going to use it to renew my teaching license. The total cost is around $200 dollars, so I will supplement the savings bond with some birthday money. But I think I finally hit on a fitting reason to cash this bond.

5 years of standard diary

In late 2004, I had lost interest in daily writing of my journal, which I had done pretty regularly since seventh grade. I didn’t miss daily journaling–my life seemed to have calmed down enough that I didn’t have to process so many things–but I did find myself thinking, “How did I spend last Memorial Day?” and “Did I make rolls last year for Thanksgiving?” I also needed a place to keep track of books read and movies watched.

I needed something to record daily life on a regular basis, but not in an excessive manner. I thought instantly of “My Dairy.” My Dairy was a small, red-bound book with a lock and a key and when you opened it, had a page for each day of the year. Each page was further divided into five sections of about four lines each, so that you could note things daily for five years. Small, compact, perfect. Exactly what I needed.

Could I find such thing? Nope. I found a few five-year diaries. But they weren’t quite right in some way or other. I didn’t really need a lock and key, or the years were already entered into the dairy pages, so that I would have to start a dairy part-way through its existence. None of them quite worked for me.

So, like any woman raised on a steady diet of books set on the frontier filled with spunky, make-do, clever women, I made my own five year dairy. I started by purchasing this standard dairy from an office supply store.
Before I bought it, I counted all the lines for each day to make sure that there were enough for five lines per day per year. There were. Then I simply wrote in the year, an initial for the day and drew a line under that. Voila! Five year diary.


After I finished the triathlon, I kept my race bib as a marker. It turns out race bibs make great markers. Bright, made of some plastic paper that doesn’t tear, just the right size.

The standard diary had extra pages which gave me ample room to keep track of books and movies. Most of the pre-made 5-year diaries didn’t have any extra pages.
I didn’t write in it every day, but most days. Friday and Saturday are notorious for not having anything written. Sometimes, if I miss a few days, I’ll jot a sentence or two as to what was going on. The fun really starts after the first year, when you can compare and contrast what was going on one (or two, three or four) year(s) previous. It’s also fun because you can email your friends with things like: Did you know that two years and three days ago we were celebrating your un-bachlorette party? Your friends will be astonished and amazed at your powers of memory.

I’m so happy with how this turned out, I’ve gotten myself another standard diary for 2010 and will begin the process over again. Look for another post at the beginning of 2015.

Resolution 2010.

I’ve read, and observed in my own life, that the interest in sewing skips a generation. My grandmother was an excellent seamstress. My mother tried, but I can still picture her exhaling sharply as she set out to rip another mis-sewn seam. She once made me a pair of pants for Christmas. Suspecting that something wasn’t right, we agreed that I would wear a blindfold and try them on. She laughed when they didn’t fit, and I took off my blindfold and laughed too.

My sewing talents don’t approach my grandmothers, and I’m in a “not sewing” holding pattern, but my homemaking gene is strong.

Similarly, my resolutions seem to go in an every-other-year success rate. In 2008, I resolved to write a letter per day and before burning out completely in late November, pretty much kept to that. Last year, I pledged to stop eating while standing. On the surface, a much easier task to fulfill, but I failed miserably at it.

With the every other year success rate, this year looks good for resolutions. At the New Year’s Eve party I attended last night my resolution was greeted with raspberries, general jeers and calls of “boring!” But I’m pretty excited about it.

Resolved: in 2010, I will spend 15 minutes per day working at my desk. In priority order my tasks will be: checkbooks, in box, blogs.

All three of those things are not really in my control. My checkbooks/money management system is admittedly a labyrinth process that could perhaps be streamlined. But I like the way I have set up its many processes, and checks and balances. When it is caught up, it gives me a sense of security.

It is rarely caught up. When I attack the to-do list monthly, it takes two or three hours and causes much shallow breathing and sighing. I also have a vague sense of unease throughout the month that I could bounce a check at any time. When I neglect the money management for more than a couple months, it takes the better part of a day to dig myself out. After the move, I didn’t catch things up for about six months and spent eight hours setting things right. A bit of daily attention would prevent this, and the resolution is designed to do just that.

My inbox is a sorry mess. I caught a reference to it in a previous blog post mentioning something about it’s geologic layers. I think I had it down to one object a few Christmases ago, but that was it. I would love to clear out that sucker, and now that my checkbooks are caught up, and presumably easy to maintain, I aim to do just that.
And oh, the blogs. In my mind, I work on them all the time. One of my friends lists my blog on her site. The listing also notes the last posting. I remember the first time I saw that my last posting on the list was three or four months old. I was surprised, then realized that just because I think about the blog daily, doesn’t mean that things are published. The thing I didn’t realize is that there are so many steps. Taking pictures, prepping pictures, making the blog post, writing it, letting it rest, editing it, editing it again, actually posting it. And I have so many damn interests. All those steps just don’t get done very often. It’s disheartening.

I don’t expect the blogs to get much better any time soon, for right now the money and the inbox promise to eat up that fifteen minutes. But perhaps the blog will move along a bit.

As for implementation, I have printed up calendars for the year and posted them on the door to the office. Each day I do my fifteen minutes, I will make a check mark of some kind on the day. I plan to prioritize this task and do it as soon as I come home from work, or first thing in the morning on non-work days.

Wish me luck.

Positive!

I’ve not been feeling well. It’s a busy time of year at school–although when is it not–and I’ve been feeling run down and my throat hurts. Strep is going around school. But I’ve googled all the symptoms and everything says that adults don’t get strep. Still, I’m not feeling well. I call the doctor and the nurse orders a strep test for me. At Nurse treatment, she tells me that while adults often get sore throats and infections, it most likely is not strep. I tell her I know. I walk the culture over to the lab and wait 30 minutes. I’ve got a limited amount of time because I have to take my Calculus final soon. The technician calls my name, “Patricia Collins?” I approach him. “Are you Patricia Collins?” he asks as he holds shut a pink piece of paper. I affirm that I am. He opens the paper to reveal that my test came back…
“Really?” I gasp. I feel like I won the lottery. “But adults rarely get strep throat!” I tell him, repeating what two nurses and the internet have told me.

“Well, you’ve got it.” he assures me. Still feeling like I won the lottery (I was right! It was totally worth it to miss the December fire drill to get a strep test! I will soon feel better!) I make my way to the pharmacy, get the drugs required and run to catch my train making it to class just in time for my final.

Laundry

A rare sight in my laundry journey. An empty laundry basket. I’m pretty good at doing laundry on a regular basis, so dirty laundry never really builds up. But clean laundry? Often times the laundry basket is holding the clean laundry waiting to be folded and put away as the dirty laundry is piling up in the closet in the space where the laundry basket goes. Interestingly, in the summer, when I can hang out the laundry to dry, I don’t have any trouble putting away the clean laundry. I think it is because I can fold it as I am taking it off the line. The other problem I have is that in the winter time, I’m mostly headed for bed when the dryer buzzes. So I’ve moved past chore mode to rest mode.