Sticks and Stars

This week I decided to attempt my grandfather’s navy bean soup, the one that consists of nothing more than water, a ham hock, navy beans and an onion. I generally tend to appreciate a somewhat more complicated recipe but my fears were somewhat allayed when I happened to stumble across a bean soup recipe that is almost exactly the same as this one, but is also supposedly famous. Either way, the whole thing is costing me about $3 to make, so if it’s terrible it won’t be that big of a loss. And who knows, maybe it will be amazing.

Last week I forwent soup to make a huge pot of spaghetti because that’s what I was in the mood for. A week later I am thoroughly spaghettied out.

Today I spent the day trying to get work done for my old job. I worked for probably six hours with almost nothing to show for it because this damned query I’m working on is insanely complicated. I had hoped to get it done so that I could post to the work order so that my boss would see me working over the weekend, but between the slowness of my remote connection and the ridiculousness of what I was trying to do, I made very little progress at all.

I’m feeling pretty stressed out about my new job. In my eagerness to show my boss what a good choice he made by hiring me, I commented several times that I’d be happy to do work at home to get caught up and to help me defeat this intense learning curve. Of course, the reality of my life is that I have these things called children and they aren’t too fond of mama growling at them from behind her laptop. And I also have this thing called a life that, while not exciting and consisting primarily of things like laundry and bill paying, is still something that needs an annoyingly large amount of maintenance. I’d like to spend my evenings doing work and studying PHP, and I’ve intended to do so every day since I was offered the job, but today is the first day it’s actually worked out. And I have yet to get to the PHP.

I had all these huge projects I was working on for my old job and I kept telling everyone I’d be done by the end of the month (and indeed, many of these projects were due on that day anyway) but they just keep stretching out longer and longer. I know that part of the reason my boss was glad to hire me was the understanding that I could start right away and indeed, he has not hesitated to start piling on new tasks and projects. I kept reassuring him that I’d be ready to tackle things by the beginning of the month and now it looks like it’s going to take longer than I anticipated.

I wish the prospect of more money could do anything at all to relieve my stress.

Today I’m doing my taxes and drawing up a new budget based on my new and exciting income. Tax time is always kind of a joyous time of year because I always get a decent return and this year is no exception. In fact, I was shocked at how much I’m getting back.

I’ve been thinking all week about lifestyle inflation and whether or not it might make sense to “inflate my lifestyle” in any way (other than merely stopping the process of taking money out of my savings account every month now that I can actually meet my basic expenses). Right now, my lifestyle is pretty well deflated. Aside from basics like gas and groceries and rent and such, the only “luxury” I splurge on is broadband and in this day and age that hardly seems like a luxury…although technically we could do without it. I don’t even have netflix anymore, instead we just get movies from the library.

I thought about some of the things I’ve given up and whether I might like to have them back. For example, I could now afford to pay for monthly parking at a garage nearby work, which would give me far more leeway in the mornings and would allow me to get to work and get home more quickly. But as I thought about it, I realized that I really enjoy my bus rides. I get almost an hour and a half each day to listen to music and read, or to just listen to music and let my mind wander. When traffic is bad I don’t have to play annoying stop and go games and wonder incessantly whether all the other lanes are going faster than mine. At times when I’m forced to drive to work for one reason or another I actually miss my bus ride and feel happy when I finally get to ride again.

I could also go back to buying $4 mochas every day but I’ve come to enjoy making my own coffee at work. I use my Aeropress and treat myself to higher end coffees with good politics and add a scoop (or two) of my homemade hot cocoa mix. I can make as much as I want and vary it exactly as I want. On days when I do give in and buy coffee (usually because I’ve run out of something at work), I can’t believe how much it tastes like slightly sweet hot water compared to what I brew.

But there are are two things I’m tempted to do. One isn’t so much temptation as a wise choice, and that is truly giving myself a spending allowance each month. That was my original plan but then changing circumstances tightened up my budget to the point that I didn’t have enough money to pay my bills, much less pay for anything extra, so that plan went out the window. Of course, I still spent money on “frivolous” things (like, for example, going out to lunch on Friday to celebrate my promotion with my team, or paying for this art class and its related supplies and babysitting) but it just all came out of my savings (on top of what was already coming out to pay my bills). I wasn’t happy about it, but I guess I was less unhappy than I would have been had I not done the things I wanted to do at all, so that’s the choice I made. Now that I can actually give myself that allowance so that I can spend on things I want while still saving money, I’m definitely going to do that.

I’m also tempted to considering hiring a cleaning service to come and clean my house periodically. I’m not sure whether it would exactly meet my needs…I’m pretty sure cleaning services do not offer the option of having someone follow my children and myself around, cleaning up the messes we leave behind, but the thought of having things like my floors and bathroom cleaned with some regularity is quite tempting. I spend way too much time cleaning and significantly more time thinking about cleaning and feeing guilty for not and feeling stressed out from the sty that surrounds me. I feel like removing that would improve my quality of life considerably. We’ll see though. I have no idea the cost of something like that and I fear it could be prohibitive…at least by my standards.