Category: Daily Life

On Friday evening, I did one of my favorite things: hanging out with other bloggers. I got to drink some of Dan‘s amazing homebrewed beer and I also had some really strong Jell-o shots made by Filegirl. Even though I’d never met most of the attendees before, everyone was really cool and I’m looking forward to meeting up with them again soon.

Amazingly enough, I still got up on Saturday morning in time to get to an 8:00 a.m. yoga class. The rest of the day was given over to web surfing and chili making. My husband and I went to a chili cook-off hosted by one of my co-workers and although I did not win, I did pick up some good ideas for making my homemade chili better. I learned that it needs to be somewhat sweeter and could benefit from chunks of grilled pork or steak in addition to the ground beef.

On Sunday I volunteered at the low-cost spay/neuter clinic. I’d meant to stay all day, but my husband wanted me to go to a jam with him in the early afternoon, so I stayed from 7:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and then passed along my last kitten to someone else.

When I got home, my husband was in bed with a stomachache. Not only had he blown off the jam, but he’d forgotten that he had some friends coming over to record. Said friends were waiting on our back steps when I arrived, so I had to shoo them away for him.

Once I grasped that the hubby wouldn’t be getting out of bed anytime soon, I went back to the clinic and finished out the day. They ended up altering 101 cats that day and they needed all the help they could get.

One of the last kittens I recovered was a little orange tabby male who was just crawling with fleas. I sprayed him with herbal flea spray (it seems safer for the young ones than the chemical stuff) and combed out as many fleas as I could find, dropping them into soapy water. In the hour or so that I had the little cat, I must have picked off 40 fleas. Every time I’d unwrap him to turn him over, I’d find fleas in the towel.

By the time I put him in the cat carrier with his siblings, I felt thoroughly itchy and crawly, although I’m sure it was all in my imagination. Even after I went home and changed clothes, I still thought I could feel fleas on me. Yucko.

So that’s my big weekend. What did you do?

In the last three days, I’ve made Pumpkin Cake Roll twice. Apparently I was so eager to have it this year that I promised it for multiple social occasions. I’m just glad that Spyder reminded me I’d offered to make one for tonight’s blogger meetup. Otherwise, I might have forgotten.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am incapable of rolling one up without having the cake crack into large sections. Fortunately the filling sticks it together, but it would certainly look nicer if that didn’t happen. I wonder if it’s my Airbake pan that’s causing that to happen? I suppose I could eventually get a regular jelly roll pan and see if that helps.

Here’s a little baking tangent that’s only relevant because it concerns something I happen to like. Via a comment by Monkey on Rancid Raves, I’ve learned way more than I wanted to know about Cool Whip. Ew. I guess it’s time I switched to whipped cream like a grownup. It’ll be the kind in the can, though, because that’s so much more fun.

If you find any typos in today’s post, it’s because Xena decided that she needed to drape herself across my arm the entire time I was composing it. She’s gone on to add "nipping the inside of my elbow" and "hooking a claw in my forearm" to her list of intrusions as I finish this up, so I’ll just say "Happy Friday" and sign off.

As part of my effort to continue eating between one payday and the next, I’ve been listing some of my excess stuff for sale on Craigslist. Man, what a great site! Listings are free, including photo hosting, and it’s mainly targeted to people in your own city who are likely to e-mail and then swing by and pay you cash if they decide they want what you’re selling.

Over the weekend I sold a pair of PA speakers that I’d owned for 19 years but was no longer using, and I have a buyer lined up for a bunch of DVD sets. I also have an ad up for a chorus/reverb effects unit, but I haven’t had any nibbles on it yet. It’s starting to make me look around and ponder what else I might be able to turn into some cash.

I found this article very interesting: Living Paycheck to Paycheck Gets Harder. It seems that prices have risen drastically in recent months and even many middle income people (hello!) are struggling to buy groceries between paychecks. I’m almost relieved to discover that it’s not just me, but it seems very alarming that things have reached such a state.

I know I sound like a broken record on this topic lately, but I’m just not accustomed to standing in the grocery store and deciding to get an unfamiliar brand of something I want to serve for dinner because it’s $.50 cheaper than the brand I usually get.

Thing are not going well in this country right now and it won’t be long before these economic problems reach so many people that they can’t be ignored. I just wish I knew what could be done about it.

Over the weekend, one of my major triumphs was replacing four bad light switches in our house. The ones by the back kitchen door had been going out for some time now. The one that controlled the light in the hallway leading up to the studio was wiggly and made a sparking sound. The one that controlled the ceiling fan/light in the kitchen sometimes had to be poked and prodded before it would do anything.

We also had two dimmer switches, which were incompatible with my plan to switch completely over to CFLs.

I’d been meaning to address the light switch problems for at least a year, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Finally, I took a trip to Home Depot, where I discovered that a light switch costs 54 cents. That’s right: I fixed all the nagging electrical problems in my house for $2.08.

I wasn’t inclined to play breaker BINGO, so I just shut off all the power to the house. We had a new breaker box put in this year and I doubt I’ll ever get around to figuring out which breaker switch goes to which part of the house.

The kitchen switches were really ancient and I’m not completely satisfied that there isn’t still the potential for a short. There was no sign of a ground wire anywhere. Thanks, previous owners! Naturally, both switches were completely different, so I had to think long and hard about how to wire them to the new switches. Fortunately, I got them both right on the first try.

The rheostats were much easier to replace because someone had already spliced new wiring (circa 1978) to the old black and white wires. The modern wiring was flexible and easy to strip after I cut the old switches off. Switches 3 and 4 went in quickly, so I had the power off for less than an hour.

I always love adding a new skill to my repertoire. Next on the list: installing a new ceiling fan in the bedroom. That shouldn’t be too hard, should it?

I forgot to mention one of my latest green initiatives the other day. I’m using GreenDimes to try to scale back the ridiculous amount of junk mail I get. I haven’t gotten my packet yet, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the mail brought down to a manageable level while at the same time causing 10 trees to be planted. The company gets extra points from me for having a navigation category on their website called "WTF."

On a tangentially-related topic, my red state has just gotten a little purpler. As I was going through the mail the other day, I spotted a voter ID card. At first I thought it was mine, but I looked closer and discovered that my husband had finally registered to vote for the first time ever. He even registered as a Democrat, which surprised me a bit because he’s quite a bit more conservative than I am. I’m so proud.

Thanks to a video featuring one of my friends, I learned about Cabaraoke! this week. It seems that when you take certain cabs home from the bars in Kansas City, you can opt to be videotaped singing along with a song as you ride to your destination.  I can’t help but think there must be some fairly significant consent issues there considering that most of the participants are obviously drunk, but the videos are still pretty funny.

Okay, I have to get in early today, so I’ll wrap things up. Feel free to say "hi" – I miss de-lurking day already.

Saturday was a pretty great day. I woke to the sound of heavy thunderstorms – in fact, the thunder and lightning woke me during the night, but I managed to fall back asleep. When it was time to really get up, I dressed in my finest yoga attire (yes, that’s sarcasm) and met my friend A. at my usual yoga studio. She hadn’t been to a yoga class in quite a while, but she liked the teacher as much as I do.

When I got home, I started the meat and beans for minestrone on the stove and mixed up the dough to make some Italian bread. Weird baking aside: I loathe the last batch of flour I bought. I always buy unbleached all-purpose flour, but this time I got a new brand that was on sale and sounded all extra organic n’ shit. It is horrible. The color is yellowish and it’s so heavy that everything I make comes out kind of tough. I don’t remember what brand it was, but I’ll know it when I see it and I’m going to stick with brands I recognize from now on. Now I just need to think of recipes I can make to use it up that won’t be ruined. Maybe cookies. But anyway…

Around the time I shaped the bread into loaves and readied it for its second rising period, my husband woke up. I decided to make a skillet of potato cubes, ham, green pepper, onion, eggs and cheese. It turned out to be a delicious breakfast, particularly with a little ketchup.

Earlier that morning, my dad had called to ask if I’d come by his office and do some work. I’d mentioned to him last week how broke I was, and I think he wanted an excuse to give me money. After I took the bread out of the oven, I went over and worked for about two-and-a-half hours and he paid me $100. Woohoo!

When I got home, I finished making the minestrone and ate two large bowls of it and countless slices of bread. (Hey, fresh bread is fresh bread, even if it is made from weird, icky flour.)

That evening, I went to a friend’s house for an informal game night. I brought a 6-pack of HardCore Cider because it seemed like a good autumn drink choice. It went well with the chocolate rice crispy treats he’d made with Cocoa Krispies and chocolate marshmallows. I ate way too many of them.

When I first arrived, I was looking around at all of the Halloween decorations and I kept hearing something that I took to be a motion-triggered evil laugh, "Mwahahahahaha." It had a gutteral tone, but at the same time was rather thin and not very loud. It turned out to be the sound that his beagle makes when she’s sniffing around for crumbs. My friends had heard it so many times that they didn’t even notice, but once I said what I’d thought it was, they found it hilarious.

We played Apples to Apples and Scene-It TV Edition until about midnight. I won one round of Scene-It and answered a lot of incredibly obscure TV questions, some from eras before I was born. It’s a wonder I can even function with all the brain space I have given over to useless trivia.

I got a good night’s sleep and I’m almost over the headache that’s plagued me all week. Today I’m making ham and onion omelets for breakfast with toasted Italian bread, and then a cheese ball to take with me to a book club meeting. It looks like it’s going to be another fun day.

Despite my efforts to cut costs and reduce my bills, I still keep running out of money every pay period. This time around, I’m already in the hole $500 worth of overdraft protection and I owe my husband $200 that I’m sure he could ill afford to give me. Being in the red at payday is probably what’s killing me – it’s hard to get caught up when you start out behind.

I need to get in touch with my mortgage company and see if I can shift the payment dates so that they fall after
the 15th and the 1st, rather than a few days before. That’ll at least
keep me from dipping into my overdraft protection so much.

The irritating thing about all of this is that I’ve been really good about cooking dinners at home and bringing lunches to work. Plus, I’ve turned into a highly efficient office food scavenger. If there’s a client or vendor in the office, chances are there’ll be leftovers around 1:30 or so. I’ve managed to score at least one free meal per week lately by just waiting and watching.

I have to pat myself on the back for the "fridge scrapings" dinner I came up with last night. I had some spicy tomato sauce left over from an earlier dinner this week, so I boiled some ziti noodles, mixed them with the sauce, added some quartered slices of pepperoni, topped everything with cheese and baked it. It was one of the better-tasting meals I’d had all week and I didn’t have to do any extra shopping to make it work.

Since I have two weekend days ahead before I get paid on Monday, my plan is to use up the other things that reside in my cupboards, refrigerator and freezer. I know I have chicken breasts, so this might be a good opportunity to fire up the grill. I have a ham steak, some eggs and potatoes, so there’s a breakfast or two. There’s still ravioli and pasta sauce kicking around. I guess as long as we’re not too picky about the kind of meat we eat, we’ll be good to go.

Beyond that, I don’t know what else I can do to scale back other than become a recluse. We’re already foregoing concerts, movies and most restaurant meals. Maybe I should use my free time to develop a more concrete marketing plan for my husband’s studio. It’ll give me something to do and perhaps boost our household income in the process.

If my mother were still alive, today would be her birthday. I won’t say which one it would have been; she was always touchy about her age. She’s been gone almost 10 years now, but I still think about her all the time. This year I thought I’d share some photos and anecdotes about her.

This first photo was taken when she was in college. She went to Purdue, was active in the theater department, and sang in a variety band. She also modeled, and this may have been either a modeling head shot or a publicity photo for one of the plays she was in.

She married my dad in 1965, and left for her honeymoon dressed in the latest fashion. I love the gardenia corsage and the hat box.

As a young newlywed, she worked as a newspaper reporter. After I was born, she stayed at home until my sister and I were old enough to start school.

Later, she ran an advertising and public relations firm with my grandmother. She had a long career in advertising, working both for other agencies and on her own, writing and producing television, radio and print ads.

When I was in my early 20s, my mother learned how to play bass and ended up touring with several different rock cover bands throughout the Midwest. I don’t exactly know how she made the leap from "Turn down that awful racket!" to learning bass, but she always enjoyed performing.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in the mid-1990s. She’d been a lifelong smoker and her addiction to cigarettes resisted all her attempts to quit. Even as she was dying in intensive care, she said she still craved nicotine so much that she thought about cigarettes constantly. If that isn’t enough reason to quit (or never start smoking at all), I don’t know what would be.

Our relationship was complicated. It’s occurred to me that I might never have started this blog if my mother had been around to read it. Still, I can’t help but be impressed by the job she did raising two strong daughters, succeeding in more than one male-dominated career field, and living life largely on her own terms. So, happy birthday, Mom.

Let me show you them:

Super Des
Suzanne
AMeadows

Congrats! I’ll get your prizes mailed out Saturday afternoon after I volunteer at a rabies clinic and attend a baby shower. 🙂