Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Cash dieting.
I’m very seriously trying to figure out how to make it down to four days a week after I get some debt paid off (hopefully this summer – fingers crossed). I suspect this means tracking all my spending and then determining how frivolous I am in order to figure out if I really can cut $600 per month from my paycheque without it being a terrible hardship. Sadly, I think I might be on the verge of exposing to myself just how unnecessary so many things I spend money on are.
One thing I know for sure is that I will always live up to whatever I bring home – meaning that with every raise I just end up with more ability to accumulate stuff rather than more savings in the bank or money down on my mortgage. Not only is that crummy ecologically, it’s also keeping me on the debt treadmill that’s got me working 5 days a week when I would really rather spend more of that time at home working on my own life (rather than the government’s).
Because I’ve got some cash coming this summer that could clear up my debt, I want to prep the rest of my life for what that might look like in terms of better spending habits and more “making-do” so that I don’t just clear off the deck to find myself right back below it again six months later. Nor do I want to go without putting savings away when I do whittle my hours down in the fall. To whit – I am embarking on something a bit like a diet plan – starting with two months of tracking everything I “consume” in order to determine where my spending weak points are. I did this a little heading into our mortgage, but since we bought the house, I’ve found a whole new level of justification when it comes to spending on household and hobby goods that I didn’t have as a renter.
Come May 1st (this is a bit like setting a quit date), I’m going to attempt to live for four months as though I didn’t have the additional four days of pay per month and see how that goes through the summer. If it works? I’m ready to go down to four days a week. If it doesn’t? I might just do it the hard way and cut my hours down anyway.
Like food and fitness tracking, I know that the only way to keep myself on goal is to record everything – so I’ve set up a spreadsheet and am going from here. A bit of a cleanse is in order for sure…. taking my life back from the machine bit by bit.
Signs of spring.
Oh glorious garlic! Like all my bulbs right now, peeking through the soil in an early attempt to establish. A reminder that the yard isn’t always going to look as grey and mucky as it does right now.
This is my day.
It’s hard to know what to say on one’s own birthday – so I will record this about the 1st day of my 38th year instead:
- I had breakfast in bed.
- There is fresh snow on the mountains and the sun is shining.
- My garlic is starting to emerge from the soil as are my other bulbs.
- I dug compost this morning, glued wood for my top-bar hive, and prodded the garden a little bit with my spade.
- I am brewing tea for a batch of kombucha.
- My porch-box is freshly planted with primulas and crocus.
- Tonight there will be dinner at Les Faux Bourgeois.
- I am still married to the man I am most suited to spend the rest of my life with.
All things considered? Life is perfect. There isn’t anything else I could possibly ask for. And I know enough to enjoy that feeling while it lasts.
I've got yard-itch!
It’s that itchy time of year for yard projects on the wet coast. Warm enough (sortof) to get outside and do some thing, but too wet for most. But if you don’t get your infrastructure done by the end of March, it seems like April is weeds and then everything else just gets away from you. So I’ve got big ambitions for the rest of February and am hoping in the next three weeks I can:
- Lay drip irrigation
- Build my top-bar hive (this is an imperative, the bees are being shipped in the next two weeks)
- Mulch
- Build two arbors.
The last two projects aren’t imperative for February, but it would sure be nice to get them done so I can move on with planting and also plotting out the frontyard. On Saturday, our friend Dave came and twenty boxwood hedges out of the front, and now I’m working with an almost-blank canvas. Time for drawings! Planning! Plotting! Even though we don’t have much money for that project just yet – Brian wants to get a hole dug for a pond and we’ll work on the plantings over time (as money allows).
Tomorrow is supposed to bring some cold-sun, and I’ve taken the day off because its my birthday – so here’s to a few hours between the hardware store and outside to celebrate!
Almost 38.
You know you’re getting old when after a “hard-partying” weekend you’re mostly feeling ill from the effects of refined sugar. While it is true that I drank upwards of a bottle of red wine on Saturday night, I’m pretty sure that this Monday-morning hangover has more to do with the fact I broke my 3-week clean-eating streak on the weekend. Not that I’m feeling down on myself about it – it was in the service of birthday festivities after all! But I sure didn’t think I’d be paying for Saturday night straight through Monday morning!
That aside, my birthday is in fact tomorrow (38!) and between B. and friends, I had a lovely social, food and drink-filled weekend that I am feeling entirely grateful and pleased about. Not only did B. arrange to bring a friend down from Bella Coola for a visit, but he put on a lovely little dinner spread Saturday night with a small collection of cool folks. This is not to mention the Friday night dinner he and M. made for me before taking us out to see True Grit (it was our family birthday celebration of sorts). And on Sunday our friends Jill and Andrew had us over for a fabulous dinner with chocolate-chilli birthday torte and everything!
On top of that, I got to finally cash in a gift certificate to Ming Wo that was given to us for a wedding present (thanks lit bitches!) Saturday afternoon, and when I went in to spend it I discovered that everything in the store was 25% or more off because of Chinese New Year. Suffice to say I got a few nice things and was once again bowled over by the generosity of that gift.
Oh, and then there was the part of the whole getting me out of the house so B. could prepare food, where my friend Sharai arranged a post-workout lunch and art gallery date Saturday afternoon which was a nice diversion, though I kept wondering why she was acting so weird the whole time (apparently this role was causing some stress as her job was to keep me out of the house as long as possible and most of the art gallery exhibitions were closed off on Saturday).
In all? A very fun and funny weekend arranged by my favourite person in the world who I am so blessed to have in my life. Yay Brian!
Tomorrow is my actual day and I’ve taken the day off work to putter in the garden and hopefully put together a top-bar beehive since my bees are scheduled for delivery in the next couple of weeks. I suppose that’s another sign of aging too – I can’t think of anything I would rather do on my birthday than work on the garden irrigation plan and prep for my next home project. Hopefully by then my system will be a bit more back to normal.
Red Cedar 