Happiness and envy

This recent article by MP Dunleavey (How rich friends make you feel poor) discusses the way your own finances can be affected (effected?) by hanging around with people who have more money than you do.

Here's the part of the article that I find interesting:

"A 2005 study by Glenn Firebaugh of Pennsylvania State University and Laura Tach of Harvard University said people were most unhappy when they were living around those who were richer."

Does this mean you should surround yourself with folks who have less than you do so that you can enjoy the feeling of being better off? Yuck.

I prefer to take this to mean that you should surround yourself with folks from all social strata, some richer than you are, some poorer.

The trouble is, that can be hard to do. It's easiest to connect with people who are similar to you. How many friends do you have who are from a different socioeconomic class than yourself? How many friends do you have who are a different race? Heck, how many friends do you have who are of the opposite sex, or even a different sexual orientation?

Luckily, I seem to have landed somewhere in the middle in terms of finances. Most of my family has more money than I have. Admittedly, I would say that more than half of my friends earn more than I do. But I do have a lot of friends who earn less. I think I'm doing okay in this regard.

I'd rather focus on having friendships that have nothing to do with money at all.

How to manage irregular income, Part 2

In How to manage irregular income, Part 1, I wrote generally about how to make irregular income last between windfalls. In this post, I'm going to talk about the specifics of how I'm managing my irregular income now that I'm freelancing.

When I quit my job, I didn't expect to be able to earn enough freelance income to cover the shortfall in my family's budget. I intended to use $6000 in savings that I had earmarked for replacing income to allow me to write. I was going to give myself six months, estimating that I'd need $1000 per month from savings to supplement my family's income. During that six month period, I was going to work on a novel.

Well, a few unexpected things have happened.

I was able to get a few more hours at my part time job, so my paychecks are a little bigger than I expected.

I got a great freelance writing gig that may turn into more work.

I think we're spending less, although I don't know how much because I've fallen behind on my spending reports. I haven't done one since June.

Yeah, um, I'm going to get started on that novel any day now. I've been a little distracted by the freelance project and by my health situation and by a three-foot-tall creature for whom I have not had nearly enough childcare this summer.

So, instead of taking $1000 per month directly from savings, here's what I'm doing. Every month I sweep freelance income out of my Paypal account and my personal checking account.

It gets divided up like this:
10% to my Roth IRA
40% to an ING Direct savings account earmarked for taxes
50% to an ING Direct savings account earmarked for living expenses

Some reflections:

Retirement savings
It's freelance income, so I know you're wondering why I'm putting it in my Roth instead of opening a SEP IRA or Keogh account. Well, at this point, I'm still earning only a few thousand a year from freelancing. It doesn't seem worth it to open yet another retirement account on top of the Roth, the Rollover IRA, and the two employer plans. We continue to contribute to our workplace retirement accounts at M's full time job and at my part time job.

Taxes
How did I come up with 40%? Well, I guessed that taxes would eat up about a third of my freelance income, and I rounded up to 40% for padding. I am supposed to be making quarterly payments but I haven't done it yet. In fact, I still haven't paid my state taxes for 2006. I really need to get on that. Hopefully I've been saving enough to pay for taxes, so it won't hurt too much when I do pay them, and if I have money left over I'll put it in my emergency fund which has taken a hit this year due to some house repairs, plus larger-than-usual medical and dental expenses.

Living expenses
So far we haven't needed to take out the full $1000 per month that I had given myself permission to take from savings. In July we took nothing from this account. In August we took $500, most of which I used to pay my COBRA premium. I figure I will just see how it goes each month and take as little as possible, with a goal of keeping that figure to $500 or less. But I'll still allow myself to take up to $1000 from this account per month if needed to pay our day-to-day living expenses.

Related posts:
How to manage irregular income, Part 1

How to manage irregular income, Part 1

If your income varies from month to month, you may have trouble figuring out how to make each windfall last til the next one arrives. Maybe you have a trickle of money that comes in from blog revenue, or royalties, or occasional consulting work. Maybe you work a seasonal second job, or you only get paid during the academic year. Maybe you freelance full time, or maybe you have a little side income in addition to your regular paychecks.

Wherever it comes from, having an irregular income stream can be a blessing and a curse. A strategy for spreading your irregular income out evenly means you'll feel the pinch less when no money is coming in.

If you have a regular paycheck in addition to some irregular side income, the best strategy may be to live on your regular paychecks and save all the irregular income. This way, your available spending money won't fluctuate. But this strategy can be dangerous if it means you don't save anything at all without the occasional windfalls. If the windfalls stop, you won't be in the habit of saving a percentage of your regular salary. But if the irregular sources of money are fairly likely to continue, living only on your regular paychecks can be a good way to ensure you're doing something worthwhile with the side income.

If you need to live entirely or partially on your irregular income, though, you need a way to manage the cash flow. Here are a few suggestions that work well for me.

Develop a budget. When you've just been paid for a big job, it may feel like you have all the money in the world. It's easy to overspend. But you may not get paid again for some time. If you make a realistic budget, you can decide how much money you're going to spend each month, regardless of how much you earned.

Decide how much of your regular living expenses needs to be supplied by your irregular income. If you live entirely on your irregular source of income, this figure will be the same as your total monthly budget. But if you have some regular income, you may only need to draw a small portion of your budgeted figure from irregular income. Either way, the amount you expect to draw from your irregular income should be realistic. Even if you don't earn that much every month, you need to average that much.

Keep the money separate so you don't spend more than you should. Some people may be disciplined enough, or their expenses may be predictable enough, that they can keep all their money in the same pot. But for the rest of us, using multiple accounts helps to prevent spending more of your irregular income than you should and leaving yourself high and dry when the income isn't coming in. At online savings banks like ING Direct, it's easy to create multiple accounts that serve different purposes.

Don't forget taxes and retirement. When you're working for The Man, somebody else is making sure taxes and social security are taken out of your paycheck before you see a dime. In many cases, your health insurance premiums and retirement account contributions are also skimmed off the top. But if you're working for yourself, you have to make sure you set money aside for these things before you put the money in your general spending account. Again, creating multiple accounts can help you do this.

Figure out how you're going to allocate income. When some irregular income lands in your hands, you need to have a plan in place for where it's going to go so you don't find yourself recovering from a weekend in Vegas and wondering how you're going to pay the rent. First, figure out how much your tax rate will be (overestimate if you don't want to do the calculations too carefully--it's always better to save too much). Put the money for taxes into a separate account until your quarterly or annual income tax bill comes due. Decide what percentage you're going to save for retirement or other goals. And whatever's left goes into a special account where you're saving for day-to-day living expenses. This is the account from which you're going to withdraw a fixed amount every month.

Make irregular deposits, but take regular withdrawals. Getting started can be tricky, because this system works best when you have a little cash cushion to get you through the lean months. But once you've got your system in place, you should be able to focus on your work without having to worry about the occasional month when you earn less than you need.

Don't forget to splurge. It's no fun to funnel ALL your money into savings, taxes, and living expenses. If your regular monthly budget doesn't include a line item for entertainment, make sure you let yourself spend a percentage point or two of any large windfalls. If you don't give yourself permission to spend money on having fun, it will be harder to stay on the wagon. Nobody can spend wisely all the time.

Nothing much to say

Just wanted to say I'm back from my vacation and a little swamped with work. Will try to think up some good posts in the next few days, but I won't have much time til after Labor Day.

Jersey Shore, here I come

This budget-minded gal is spending the weekend down the shore with some friends. How can I afford to do that? I'm camping, of course!

Although even camp sites aren't cheap down there. I've stayed in cheaper hotels, and I'm not even talking about that place where I paid $1.50 per night including breakfast in Indonesia.

You won't hear from me this weekend, because I'll be playing on the beach with L and his friend S, a strong-willed girl who knows how to hold her own with my bossy little guy. It helps that she's about six inches taller than he is, despite the fact that she's only 3 months older. I am carefully bringing two shovels, two buckets, and two rakes. We're going to see a play while we're there, because apparently even beachgoers need some culture. And we'll also visit a friend who lives in the beach town we're visiting. We'll meet her new baby, and hopefully get to know her new husband. And I'll be spending the first part of the trip glued to the new Harry Potter novel unless I finish it before then. I did not buy the thing (the only novels I'll buy in hardback as soon as they come out are Laurie King novels) but somebody gave it to me. It took me a couple weeks to get around to starting it, but now that I have, I'm having a hard time putting it down.

I can leave for the camping trip with a clear head, mostly, because I finished my freelance writing project this week. Except that the editor has been eerily silent since I sent her my draft. Excuse me while I go check my email one more time, because maybe she wrote back to me since I checked it ten minutes ago.

Although the campsite is rumored to have wireless (!) I will NOT be bringing my laptop. Everybody needs to unplug now and again.

See you next week!

Related posts:
Camping gear on a budget

The cost of preschool

Many parents get serious sticker shock when they go to enroll their kid in preschool. We were not phased because preschool is so much cheaper than infant care, which we had been paying for since our son was 3 months old. By the time he got to preschool, I was used to writing those checks every month that topped our mortgage payments.

And I'm one of the lucky ones who makes enough money that I still have a few coins to rub together after I pay for childcare. I know many parents who say they cannot afford to work because they don't make enough money to pay for childcare.

This year, though, we've found a way to drastically reduce our preschool bills--we've enrolled our son at co-operative preschool. However, I don't think I would have been able to toe the line at the co-op if I hadn't quit my major dayjob in May to pursue a writing career at home.

I was happy to see that this article at MSN Money, $7000 a year for blocks and Play-Doh, discussed co-op schools at some length.

I just hope I don't hate it. Scrubbing toilets at my kid's school doesn't sound like a huge improvement over my old dayjob, but at least there will be more continuity between home and school for my son. Plus, the school has the biggest library I've ever seen in a preschool, and as a librarian I'm a sucker for any place that prioritizes books.

The pricetag for my son to go 5 days a week from 9 until 1? A little bit under $400/month, and that includes a small voluntary donation to the school's scholarship fund.

I'll let you know how it goes once school starts.

Review of Video Conversion Experts

If you want to drive yourself crazy, try this exercise. Go through your closets and desk drawers. All of them. Yes, the basement too. Pull out all the video footage you have, whether it's in reels or cassettes or laserdiscs. Now calculate how much you spent on all that equipment and film. Do you still have the right hardware to play that old footage of Junior's first steps? I didn't think so.

Luckily there are plenty of film transfer companies out there to transfer your old Super 8, 16mm, and 8mm to DVD.

Video Conversion Experts is one such company, based in Arizona. The site stands out in a few areas. First of all, you can get an online quote, and they have clear step-by-step instructions for how to send in your video. They routinely restore your video when they transfer it to DVD, and their end results are high-resolution enough so they don't look crappy on high-definition TVs. Want to make sure they're legit? They're certified by the Better Business Bureau.

And how good are their prices? A little searching reveals that they're not the cheapest out there, but their service seems to be more comprehensive than other companies. You can get your old film converted to DVD somewhere else for less money, but most companies don't include restoration work in their basic package. Also, since you pay them based on the number of hours of video they're converting, you don't have to pay a high flat fee just to convert 15 minutes of footage. Their turnaround time seems remarkably quick to me as well, at 12-14 days.

As a library geek who hangs out with archivists, I'd like to see some discussion of how customers can care for their DVDs so they'll last as long as possible, and maybe a discussion of the fact that today's DVD technology will probably be obsolete eventually. Just look at the floppy disk--once a standard format, now a specialty item that many people don't have the technology to read. But this is something I'd like to see addressed by the industry as a whole, and I would have been pleasantly surprised if I'd found this kind of content in the site's articles.

Overall I find the site helpful and easy to use. The next time I'm at a family gathering with my spouse, I'm going to gently remind my father-in-law that he was thinking of having the family videos digitized. I think he could do a whole lot worse than this company to transfer his old Super 8 film to DVD.

Thirsty? Turn on the tap.

How much bottled water do you drink? And how certain are you that it's not straight tap water?

This recent article in the New York Times (A Battle Between the Bottle and the Faucet) points out that drinking the recommended 8 glasses of water a day would cost you 49 cents per year if you drank from a New York City faucet, but the same amount of bottled water could cost about $1400.

Even if you don't care about all that plastic going into the landfill, it's just bad math to regularly drink bottled water.

Now, I admit, I get squeamish about drinking city water all the time, so I own a Brita pitcher, and fill a Nalgene bottle to bring along every time I leave the house. The only time I buy bottled water is on road trips, and that's only after we've run out of water from the several bottles we filled from the Brita pitcher before we left home.

Is the Brita really cleaning up my water? That's debatable. I think it tastes better, but I'm prepared to admit that may be largely psychological. And the filters aren't cheap. But it's cheaper and greener and frankly, it's more convenient than lugging cases of Naive, I mean Evian, home from the store every week.

What do you drink?

Informal savings clubs

Have you and your friends ever helped each other save for a goal? Sometimes having someone besides yourself to be accountable to can help you stay focused.

I just found out that a group of employees at my workplace have a rainy day fund. Every payday, they each give $20 to Seamus, and Seamus deposits they money into an account. He tracks the balance in Excel and provides regular statements to each participant. Right before Thanksgiving, they have a big party and empty out the account. Each person gets the money they've been putting in, plus interest. Most of them use it to buy Xmas presents.

Of course, you could do this yourself by setting up an autodeposit to a special account. ING Direct would work especially well, since it's easy to create new accounts earmarked for different savings goals. But for some people, that money is too accessible. It's too easy to log in and withdraw the money to use it for something else before you reach your goal.

With my coworkers' rainy day fund, they can ask Seamus to give them their money before Thanksgiving if they need it. And Seamus says, "okay, it's your money." But most of them leave it there, and they avoid the trap of buying Xmas presents on credit cards.

Apparently they've been doing this for years. At present, there are 8 people participating. One person's column on the balance sheet is as low as $60. Others have almost $600 in the account.

I would still rather have my money in my own account, password protected, not in a group account controlled by somebody I work with. But if I lacked self control, and a trusted friend, and wanted to save money for a goal, I'd consider doing this.

I just hope they know where Seamus lives.

Freelancing: A day in the life

Today has been a good day so far. I have not been plagued by my biggest flaw: procrastination. If every day was like today, I think I could really get into this working from home business.

7:30 AM. Get up, wash, eat, and help my family get out the door. Admittedly this was easy since M was taking L to camp today and he had already gotten the kid's bag ready to go to camp the night before.

8:30 AM. Family gone. Make a cup of coffee and finish reading the new Ondaatje novel. Speculate about what happened to the characters he unsatisfyingly abandoned two-thirds of the way through. Wonder if the passage about fame on 223 is derived from his own life.

9 AM. Sit down to work. Somehow avoid opening my internet browser. Spend 90 minutes pounding out the rest of a very rough first draft of an article I'm working on.

11:30 AM. Draft complete. Finally let myself open browser. Exchange work-related emails with my editor and with my supervisor at my moonlighting gig. See what folks are talking about in my favorite online forum and check a couple blogs.

12. Eat a frugal lunch of eggs and potatoes and a sliced apple off of my mother's gorgeous china plates.

12:30. Take a walk in the beginnings of a rain shower. Stop and meet some neighbors whose child will be in my son's class this year. Somebody told me they lived a couple blocks from me and I deduced it was them even tho we had never met because they're the only other family besides us for several blocks around who is a.) caucasian or similar and b.) has pre-school age kids.

1. Come home. More work emails and a couple phone calls. Watch a female goldfinch perched on a sunflower in my garden digging seeds out with her beak.

1:15. Dash off a quick blog post.

1:30. Lie down for half an hour under the ceiling fan. Feel justified due to recent surgery.

2. Work for another hour, then pick kid up at 3.

3-4. Read library books to kid, try to build a tugboat out of legos, eat watermelon on the front porch, maybe walk alongside as he rides his tricycle around the block a couple of times.

4. Plunk kid in front of video to work for another hour.

5. Feel guilty but say yes to the second video. Start dinner.

How much of my trash ends up in a landfill?

Green this and green that. It's all I hear about nowadays.

I've been a steady but not exactly avid environmentalist for most of my life. I have always recycled when it was reasonably convenient to do so. I compost my kitchen and yard scraps. I buy organic products if they're available and affordable. I sometimes walk or take the train when I could more easily drive. I wash out and re-use plastic containers, bags, flatware, and dishes. I don't buy disposable things if I can help it.

But now that even the Republicans are admitting that global warming is a real problem, I'm starting to feel like I should be more aware of the environmental impact I'm having.

For example, how much of my family's garbage actually ends up in a landfill? Is there something else I could be doing to reduce my garbage output?

I found this super cool pie chart on the Recyclebank website:




(Recyclebank is a company that offers incentives-based single-stream recycling.)

The chart shows what makes up the average household's 2.5 tons of garbage a year. I'm going to do a very rough guesstimate of how much of each type of material I re-use or recycle before it goes in the garbage can at the curb each week.

Paper. I estimate that we recycle three-quarters of the paper we use. The paper that's not recycled is either part of something else (think plastic-coated paper milk cartons) or has private data on it and is shredded. I used to put my shredded paper in the compost, but then I started worrying about all those chemicals leeching into the groundwater, not to mention my veggie garden. The shredded paper is too messy to recycle so it goes in the trash.

Yard waste. I compost most of my yard waste. When I mow the lawn, I usually leave the clippings lying on the grass to break down. It looks grotty but it's the best thing for the grass and I'm lazy. Sometimes I rake it up and put it in the compost bin after it dries a little bit. I don't compost rose bush trimmings, thick sticks, or weeds that have gone to seed. Sometimes I don't get around to carrying yard waste from the garden in the front to the compost bin in the back and it ends up in the trash, but I'm trying to get better about this.

Metals. Not sure. I recycle aluminum cans and aluminum foil, but I throw away jar lids and pretty much anything else that's metal. I don't think that accounts for much, though, so I'd say we recycle 80% of our metal garbage in the form of food cans.

Glass. I recycle virtually all of it, because the only glass garbage we generate is food-related. I guess we don't recycle light bulbs, tho. So maybe 90 % is recycled. And there was some glass when we were renovating our house that went to the dump. (Old jalousie windows, mostly, which I tried to convince the recycling truck to take and they thought I was nuts.)

Food waste. We probably compost about 75%, maybe a little less. Since we live in the city, we can't compost anything with oils or animal products. I also don't put things with salt in the compost. So the remains of all prepared foods, pretty much, get thrown out. All veggie scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, tea leaves, and fruit get composted.

Plastic. Right now we only recycle about 25 or 30% of our plastic, and we can't even do it at the curb. Our monthly neighborhood plastics drop-off takes ONLY plastics marked 1 or 2. They have to be food containers and they have to have a skinny neck, like a ketchup bottle. Go figure. So they won't take yogurt containers and the like. I have no idea why this is. I hope my lazy and corrupt city councilperson gets off her duff and gets single-stream curbside recycling for our district before the decade is out. Since it's hard to recycle plastic where I am, my best bet is to reuse plastic containers whenever possible and even better, to avoid buying things that are packaged in plastic as much as I can.

Other. Hmm. Not knowing what "other" is, I have no idea how much of it I'm recycling. Cloth? Dental floss? The cottony filling inside diapers? What is "other"? I don't think we recycle too much of it, although I am happy to report that we're down to one pull-up at night, so our garbage output has gone way down now that the kid is out of diapers. Instead, we use more water washing five or six pairs of Thomas the Tank Engine underpants every day, but it's an improvement.

What about your household? And can you see any areas where I could improve?

On privacy

Today I called Fidelity to initiate a rollover from my former employer's retirement plan into an IRA. As usual, they were efficient and fabulous and altogether a joy to do business with.

Except.

To verify my identity, the customer service rep asked me several questions, which included details about places I have lived and people I have known. Apparently this info is drawn from a private company's database that collects public records. The customer service rep read a series of addresses where I might or might not have lived in a particular town, and I was aked to tell them which address I have actually been associated with. In one case, they asked about an address where my boyfriend lived many years ago. I stayed there for a month at one point, and briefly received mail there when I was between apartments.

This gave me the heebie-jeebies, so I asked the rep if he could give me the name of the database. He was willing to tell me the name of the software they use to draw from the database, but not the name of the database itself or the name of the company who maintains it.

I can understand the former addresses thing. After all, that's freely available in my credit report. But the thing about people I have known. That bothers me. Maybe it's because I live with somebody whose family has been persecuted for their political beliefs for four generations, but I'm a little paranoid about the thought that somebody is keeping lists of folks I have been associated with.

This is especially creepy because I just had to submit a list of every address and every single person I've lived with since 1975 in order to get child abuse history clearance for a job. Is that list going to end up in this public record database? Am I going to call Fidelity the next time I need to speak to a customer service rep and have to answer questions about the tiny apartment my parents rented in 1976, or the alcoholic artist who was my housemate briefly 1998?

There's no telling what They know about me and how They're using it.

Next time I get an annual privacy notice in the mail, I might actually read the thing.

Locally grown

You can't get more local than your own yard.

Today I harvested (and handed out to neighbors) a half a dozen tomatoes. I also picked the rest of the pinto beans L planted, and cut off a big sunflower that has been drooping over for several days. That will be a fun project this evening--picking all the seeds out of the sunflower. I think I'll save some seeds to plant next year (as my friend suggested) and roast the rest.

A very satisfying haul.

Here are some other gardening posts from some of my regular reads:
Pann's watermelon obsession
Photos of Boston Gal's garden

Saving money on used appliances

What to do when your refrigerator dies suddenly during a heat wave in August? Even if you don't mind losing all that food, it's pretty hard to get by for very long without a fridge. And new fridges are among the most expensive appliances. Our solution? Contact the used appliance dealer we bought a fridge from several years ago when we still lived in an apartment to see if he has anything in stock that he can deliver today. He didn't, but he referred us to another used appliance dealer who is within a couple miles of our house and can have a refurbished fridge installed in our kitchen within about 3 hours.

We're taking some chances and giving something up by taking this route. Our kitchen with its black-and-white floor, black-and-white stove, and black dishwasher will now contain a beige fridge. Oh well. And the fridge is missing one of its crisper drawers, which I'm hoping we can replace. Plus, the dealer didn't know how many cubic feet the fridge holds. He was able to tell us the outside dimensions, so I'm pretty sure from comparing it to new fridges on Whirlpool's website that it is a 15-cubic-foot fridge.

We're also giving up the warrantee we'd have gotten with a new fridge, altho this dealer guarrantees it for 90 days. Hopefully that's long enough to determine whether the thing actually works. We also won't get to choose the most energy efficient model, but fridges with the Energy Star approval sticker on them start at around $200 more than non-Energy Star models, according to the Home Despot website.

At this moment, the only air conditioned room in our house (the bedroom) has 3 coolers and a couple milk crates full of food sitting just inside the door. Our fridge is emptied out except for the freezer, and we're awaiting delivery of a 1-year-old refurbished Whirlpool that will cost us just under $200 including delivery.

We're a long way from being ready to join The Compact, which is a group of people who buy almost no new products and seek to reuse or trade or buy used whenever possible. But M and I still like to buy used whenever we can, partly to save money but also to contribute just a little less to the landfills.

Tired, but happy

Good news! My surgery went well and it turns out that I do NOT have cancer. I do have endometriosis, which I'm still learning about, but I am thrilled to have a treatable condition (even if it may be chronic) that is not Big Scary Cancer.

Feeling elated by the post surgery news meant that I have been healing fast and smiling at everyone. And I got to feel like a mini celebrity in the hospital. My childhood cancer was so unusual that nurses and residents kept coming over to me and saying, "I read your chart. I have never heard of a child having that kind of cancer. How on earth did they discover it?"

It's funny how personal finance follows you everywhere. One of the orderlies who wheeled me from the OR back to the recovery room is trying to decide between paying off his car loan and taking a vacation. "I'll probably pay off the car," he said. Glad to hear it, buddy. I have no idea what this person looked like because they made me give my glasses up early in the day, but I was entertained that even there I found myself in the middle of a discussion about money. I didn't even bring it up!

My son had a very successful first sleepover at a friend's house so we could go to the hospital early in the AM. We took advantage of his absense to go see the Bourne Ultimatum. We both liked it, altho I was annoyed that a highly trained CIA operative who happened to be female didn't have more ass-kicking scenes. Julia Stiles can do better than that. Maybe it's the director's fault? Plus there was a trailer about a secret document hidden below the Library of Congress that M and I both found hysterically funny. Librarian humor, I guess. Sorry I can't recall the title.

I am about to go sit gingerly in the chair beside L's bed and sing his bedtime songs. I am sore and a little groggy, but tonight I am one very happy mama.

I hope you and yours are all well.

The best toys for kids

My son always wants more, more, more toys. And I'm always saying "no". But sometimes he invents his own toys, and I'm willing to buy things to encourage this even if it's not his birthday.

For example, this week I spent about $3 at the hardware store buying different sizes of S-hooks, and another $1.29 at the corner store buying some simple cotton butcher's string. He's been into playing with string and hooks for a few weeks now, and the way he plays with them is so creative that I offered to get him some different sizes of hooks.

Every day he thinks up a new game to play with this stuff. This morning, before he was even dressed, he was captain of the tugboat Miriam, and he was helping to guide a freighter named Queen Elizabeth II into port. He did not have a toy tugboat or a toy freighter. All he had was a piece of string, and he made this game up while he was waiting for me to finish brusing my teeth. He tied one end of the string to the railing at the top of our stairs (the freighter Queen Elizabeth II). He tied the other end to the doorjam of the bathroom door (the tugboat Miriam).

Of course, I was not too happy to have a string tied at waist-level across my upstairs hallway, but hearing him up there shouting instructions to his crew was worth it.

Another country heard from

Just jumping online real quick to say I know, I know, I haven't posted my net worth statement or expense report for July, much less written anything useful about personal finance lately. What can I say. I'm stealing this quick minute while L is absorbed in a video called "There Goes a Bulldozer". I really should hop up and get us ready to go. We're off to a block party in our old neighborhood, altho why I consented to go to an outdoor party on a day like this I don't know. L looks like someone put him in the bathtub with his clothes on and I'm not much better.

Then we have to come home and clean the house so the friend who is coming to stay with us and care for L while I'm having surgery won't be disgusted.

Plus, I am determined to go on a date with M to see the new Bourne movie, so we have to make time for that.

And there's that freelance project, and and and.

As usual, too much to do for the hours in the day.