FundyNutter

Meatless and Monday go together like Fish on Friday. The new ecclesiastical comestible schedule of the greenish set.  But as it would happen, at some point in my development my brain was formed, like playdough in a mold, unable to visualize dinner not based on meat.

I had four recipes in hand to make on rotation. The third Monday came and I made the  meat-free enchiladas. Enchiladas are something I can really rock. They are the dish to send to friends who are laid up with a new baby, guaranteed to taste great. But, without the meat, they taste disappointingly like bean burritos that took too long to make.

And as is my way, after the first disappointment, I stopped.  Two weeks ago we had some reason about being too busy, and then last week I forgot. And this week I didn’t want to. I wanted to make real enchilada’s. I wanted to use up the shredded pork from last night’s Honduran supper. So I did.

That’s what an experiment is for, I suppose. To see what will happen.

Tonight, I am rocking the left-overs.  I used up the meat and beans and sauce from last night. And I made a tasty, creamy, fake enchilada sauce with leftover gravy as a base.  I used up the tortillas from the freezer. I’m as pleased as I could be with myself. So often my leftovers go in the trash. I hate that.

So there you go, a green up date. I wasn’t as green as could be, but now, the leftovers won’t be green either.

One thing I do online is browse around at the Babycenter girl names discussion board. Words in general entertain me, and names are words, so I like talking about what people name people. I found the site when I was trying to name my little people. I hang around there still because it is still fun.

Some people hang around there to practice their role playing and fiction. We normal people call them trolls. They like to make up fantastical and entertaining lives. They hunt around the internet to find pictures of babies and then use those pictures to show they are real people. It is very weird. It reminds me of when I was in high school and left notes for the next person who used my desk. I was a freshman. In my mind I was a mystery girl and very intriguing to the person who used the desk next. But after a short while it lost interest for me.

The trolls don’t seem to loose interest in their crazies. They come back again and again with different personalites. Quite frequently we *catch* them at it. It helps that one of our friends online is an English professor trained to see plagerism in an instant. It is like second nature to her to catch two people who write exactly the same way. Like literary fingerprinting.

So trolls, to me, are people who go online to be someone else. To live a little fantasy–usually over the summer, during spring break, and duirng the Christmas holidays. I’m sure that’s why it reminds me of high school…

The troll is one side of the coin used in community exchange online. The other side would be bloggers. Or at least bloggers like me. Wanting to come online, where perhaps not many of my three dimensional friends will find me, to be more myself. To let all of that crabbiness, crankiness and opining out. Those things get stuffed down of a day because it’s really not enjoyable to be around cranky, crabby, opinionated people. It feels good to have a place to hash out life’s difficulties and complain about those injustices that everyone else is tired of hearing about. (Pre-school costs how much?! For coloring and riding tricycles? Who do they thing we are, desparate housewives?!)

In real time, in the real world, I know that what I ought to do is die to self and live to Christ. I want to work on being more like Christ, less vain, less self-righteous, less always-having-the-last-wordy. But the last word feels good. And on a blog the last word is always the bloggers word.

In this funky little electric world I get to revel in my Traci-ness.

I have been very surprised by the revelations. It would seem I really do like to chew on keeping house and dirt and stuff. I thought I’d spend more time writing about literature and theology. And I am in a constant battle with self not to write exclusively about all the people I know and the various ways they drive me nuts. Sure, I love all my friends dearly. But my own place to complain? Where someone might read it and sympathize? Priceless. But not very Christlike.

It feels like backwards trolling. Giving a picture of myself or my life that is so one-sided it’s not actually accurate anymore. I don’t have pictures up here because I haven’t taken the time to put them up. But I can tell you I have a toothy grin, straight, thin, brown hair, and glasses. I can tell you I have sticks for legs and stubby fingernails. All true, and the opposite of the glamorous life a troll drums up. But at the same time, it sounds negative written like that. Like false humility. Trying to be too real. I’ve been told I have an infectious, big smile. I translated it toothy because it does show a lot of teeth. And the hair is straight and thin and brown but it is also shiny, easy to manage, and looks nice with my skin tone and eyes. My legs are stick like, but back when those kind of things mattered (in high school) thin legs were in. All those descriptives are true, but they are not completely accurate.

I write complainy things about my church but I don’t write how nice everyone is. How I was waiting for Norah at AWANA and a nice woman went on and on about how much she hoped I would do VBS again. She said it wouldn’t be the same without me. Or about how fun it was to have a hot dog feed this afternoon. I had a lovely chat with the nice, polite teenage boy that took my money. Eons ago he was in my second grade Sunday School class and now his voice is changing. I feel a sense of belonging and family at my church. Of course, that same sense of family is what makes conflict so painful. But do I have to dwell on the painful, or the conflict, in a blog? Is that just another way of being someone else online. Someone not entirely unme, but not entirely me either.

I tend towards the sarcastic and speak before I think. Online I can edit, and maybe ought to more. I want to edit to be more sarcastic, to let all my pent up sarcasm out. To let out all that crabby, cranky, and opinionated that I havent’ gotten rid of yet.

I don’t want to be painted with the brush of the troll. I don’t want to be merely the other side of the troll coin. So, I’ll try to be nice. I may (or may not) try to be discreet. But I will keep trying to be a whole, real me. And at least try to be Christ like. Because that trying is also a part of me.

Budgets. Living cheaply. Being satisfied with what you have and getting what you want for less than nothing.

When I was 23 I chose a very expensive lifestyle that would last my whole life. I got married to a man whose whole family lives in the midwest. We live in the Pacific Northwest near my family. To maintain a good relationship with his family, we feel like we need to have long distance calling on our telephone, an internet connection, and plane tickets one or two times a year. That kind of living is very expensive.

We go as cheap as we can on all of those items. I am convinced I have it set our communication expenses as cheap as they can go. The plane tickets are less easy to control. When we travel over Christmas we don’t have a choice but to buy more expensive tickets. And with four in our family, it takes careful planning through the year to have cash for that expense.

Our other living expenses could be cheaper if we lived in Kansas, near my husband’s family. Our home would cost half of what this house cost, or even less if we weren’t neighborhood picky. But possibly our income would be less as well. And I am fairly certain we would be obliged to send out kids to the private school that Daniel attended, where his mother works and his father is on the board. That alone would eat up any savings we would have from living there. Here we can choose a quality, free education.

I spent some quality time at MSN money today. One woman, Donna Freedman, wrote a story about how to live poor. She has real poor experience, living on only $12,000 a year. That sounds about impossible to me. But she does take advantage of programs for low income like food banks and lower electric rates. Friedman is staring over after divorce and attending college. So her exceptionally low income is intended to be transitional. Her goal would be to acheive an income after college that takes her to a place where she doesn’t need programs. But she has learned to be content whatever her situation, whether in plenty or in want. And as she is walking her well-budgeted path she has learned to tell the difference between things she wants and things she needs.

She made a couple of comments that were so brilliant I wanted to share them. The first is a series of rules for being poor. They are as follows:

• Rule 1: Have very little money.
• Rule 2: Live on it.
• Rule 3: Rule 2 will change your life, if you let it.

So simple, so true and so hard to put fully into practice. For example, I tell myself that a thirty year mortgage is normal. It isn’t any different than just paying rent to the bank. I can say that all I want, but the black and white truth of it is I don’t have the money to buy this house so I borrowed it from the bank. That is not living on what you have. That is living on what the bank has.
I read another article this morning that spoke at length about living on only the money you have. I agree so completely in my heart, but the home loan is just one part of the debt story at our house. Daniel and I were debt free (except the house) for about four years. Then we bought a newish car. But I didn’t wait until we had cash. I just didn’t want to wait anymore. The feeling of want wasn’t satisfied by the newish car though. It was replaced by my desperate want to ditch the car loan as fast as I can. So just do it, right? But I also want to replace the rotten deck. We have the rotten deck removed, but ceder is not cheap. As happy as I will be to see new ceder replacing our old dry rot each nail we hammer is going to look like a dollar to me–a dollar I didn’t put extra on the car loan.

As Dave Ramsey says, if you can’t pay cash for it right now, you can’t afford it. That is so true. We can’t afford the car! Getting it wasn’t a sin, and God isn’t mad at me. But, as Dave points out constantly, The Borrower is Slave to the Lender and so Traci is slave to Bank of the West. I have to obey Bank of the West, putting the orders on their payment coupons before other things until the obligation is finished.

I want to be debt free again. And I really, really, want to be completely debt free. I want to make our mortgage go away before I turn fourty. It is such an impossible dream–so much so that I have never put it in words before. But now that it is in print it seems like I could do it. Maybe.

Oprah encourages everyone to live on only half of what they make. If I could figure that out, I think we could end our slavery to The Mortgage Service Center, powered by PHH as well as Bank of the West.

Dave Ramsey says don’t do debt. I mostly don’t. We’ve got no credit cards, no in store credit, no furniture on installment, no student loans. Just the car and the house. Donna Freedman says live on what you make. We mostly do. Oprah says live on only half of what you make. This would be a real challenge.

Donna Freedman also says: “Not that being poor makes me noble. It doesn’t. It just makes me careful. And grateful.”

The beauty, simplicity and humility in that statement is what made me want to talk about budgeting again. We should all be careful, whether in want or in plenty. We should all be grateful as well. We should steward our resources, which I know looks different for different people. Not everyone should go back to school, sell everything they own and start completely over again like Donna Freedman has had to do. And very few people can become multimillionaires on the strength of their personality like Dave Ramsey and Oprah have. But everyone can work to live on what they make and be grateful for what they have.

Our budget is something I obsess over. I pore over it, and information about budgeting and living carefully. It interests me and gets me excited. (What a geek!) So the next thing I am going to do today is pull out may papers and see exactly how close to living on half of what we make we can get. I know with our car and our house we are obligated to live on more than half, but I am really curious to see how close we can get. And really grateful that we can try.

I may have an unhealthy obsession with the minutia of life. In fact, I could talk about meaningless nothings until I pass out. Or at least the things I could talk about until I pass out would seem like meaningless nothings to most people. For example, I was really, really disturbed and could not stop talking about the end of the Ninth Doctor. That’s right. Years after the fact, when Dr. Who finally stopped by my neck of the woods, I got very attatched to Christ Eccleston. (A fine actor by the way, whose movies are worth checking out.) And when he regenerated into the tenth doctor…well. I had a lot to say.

Or this “using cleaning as exercise” business. I didn’t plan on bringing it up again until the end of the month and here I am, mere moments later, it would seem, wanting to yammer a little. Did you know, when you clean to the point where it is exercise-worthy you get really tired? And sore? And cranky? I do have a pretty clean laundry/masterbath room now. But it took all day. Wait, let me say that in italics. It took all day. Oi.

To start with, I had to get some of that laundry going so I could throw the baskets in the other room. Then I had to sweep. That means wrestling the broom away from one of two little girls both of whom would like to play Cinderella. Except not in a helpful housewench kind of way. Much more in a run around with a broom sqeeking like a mouse and knocking things over kind of way. Then there’s the mopping, and the sweeping, and the tapestries, and the draperies…oh wait. That was Cinderella. I had sweeping, mopping, wiping, cleansing, gagging and complaining. Do the children really have to use every single potty training toilet in the house? For fun? One has been pottytrained for ages and the other still uses a diaper. Why are the potty chairs messy? Why? Why?. Scratch that. I don’t want to know. They have been put up far out of reach of little tushies now.

I also made the beds, with the thought in mind that a tidy bed always feels nice to look at and of course, uses energy. It also uses energy to hollar at the kids: “Get off the beds! Dont’ get in the blankets! No! Get down! Mommy said get down! ARRRRGG! I’m the pirate who makes the beds! Get off of my bed!” Or something like that.

So some things got done like I thought they would and other things didn’t. For a while there (a few weeks even) I was washing three small loads of dishes a day to keep the counters nice and clean. (The dishwasher is broken. Oh wait. No I’m not. But I do feel very green putting my clean dishes in the broken kenmore to dry.) Today the dishes sat until after dinner. And Norah didn’t wear any pants today. Well, that hour when we went to Walmart she did. But she took them off again as soon as she could. So one point for made bed, minus a point for naked kid.

I did pick up the clothes from the hall bathroom floor. That wasn’t even on the list. So bonus point, no?

I think tomorrow will be one of the vacuum days this week. My arms are aching at the thought. (Yes, Consumer Reports did mention that Eureka’s bossy vacuum was heavy. But you know, it was also the “Best Buy.” And who lets a little thing like upper arm fatigue get in the way of a Best Buy?!)

And one more pointer from the “Work Harder and be Inefficient” file. I found a great deal of my work out today came from having very inconveniently placed garbages and recycling. Definitely don’t put a garbage can in every room. For one thing, it just makes one more garbage can that will eventually overflow with scratch paper and other stuff you know better than to throw away. And the other thing is, of course, running back and forth the the slider door to toss things into the outside bins is good for you. Good old fashioned stupid exercise.

From Heloise to Real Simple, it seems like most advice in the world, with regard to housekeeping says “Forget those dust bunnies under the bed! Who cares!” Frankly, I don’t care. The dust bunnies could set up art school under my bead. They could teach welding with real torches and I wouldn’t care.   The same  goes for other dirty little secrets like cob webs in ceiling corners and fingerprints on windows.

As an American I have to aknowlege though, that we are in the middle of a national health crisis. It is a bit disingenuous, or maybe just annoying, for me to bring up the American obesity issue.  I am blessed with a wonderful metabolism and terrible eating habits.   But if I set that aside I can admit I have a good ten pounds that I should have lost sometime in the last two years (after the baby) and everyone knows that skinny and in shape aren’t the same thing.

I tend to think that the problem is more than just fast food on every street corner and heavily marketed convenience food.  It seems to me that we have a really really big mindset problem that has obesity as one of the symptoms.  Dustbunnies are another one.

I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while now.  Dirty homes and chubby mummies may  just go hand in hand.  “What,”  I thought to myself, “would happen to me if I worked harder to keep a clean house?”  Well, work makes me tired, so it must be burning calories. And burning more calories means…loosing weight! (Eventually, when paired with a healthy diet, blah blah blah.)

I’m going to make myself an experiment for the good of the people.  There are jobs I just don’t do around here, because they are work. Such as mopping the floors.  You see, I may spend a good twenty mintues mopping every hard surface in my sight, but the kids will eat again in another five minutes and it will have all been for naught.  Or will it? Firstly, the total accumulation of grunge on the floor will be less. And secondlyI will have burned calories. So there you go.

Other things to keep in mind while using housework as exercise: efficiency is your enemy.  Be like me, use the heaviest vacuum cleaner you can find.  Ignore everything I said in the previous post  about letting the cleanser clean for you. It is time to scrub harder. And by all means flip those mattresses!

My current plan includes vacuming every carpeted floor twice this week (yes, when I had one baby I did it everyday,) making all three beds everyday, and giving the master bath a thorough scrub down once this week.  The other work, the stuff I more or less take care of regularly, I am going to try to do less efficiently.

When I had this idea in February, I was also doing crunches at night, a little focused abominal abdominal attention even though everyone knows you can’t do focused toning to loose weight just where you want to.

I’ll check back in on this topic in about a month, giving some stats about how clean my house became and then stayed and how much change in body I found.  I may have to go by measurements, since we don’t have a scale.  But I’ll do something measurable.

Because mucus is a great way to start the morning off right, I’ll give an update on the March Mucus experiment of 08. My chest seems mostly cleared, the mucus, lovingly referred to as rubber cement, has migrated North. No longer shoulders to top of head, it now lives in the space between my jaw and the top of my head. You know, where my brain used to live. The sharp pain hasn’t abated yet–not since it began on Sunday. No cold medicine, steam, sleep nor tincture of opium has proven effective yet. But the low grade fever is gone. And with it the dizziness, confusion and disparing of life.

Gone they are, but not forgotten. Lucy is established on my lap right now, and content to stay their until she graduates college, I think. Because she has the snot and the fever and the despair now. Poor baby.

Not that I keep a venue of the internet up just to complain about our aches and pains. That sounds boring. But since I am taking another moment to share the trials ’round here, I’ll share one more. Poor Daniel has been looking forward to the big game (the one that started airing 17 minutes ago) for days on end. And it was his natural day off too.

But funerals have proven yet again, to be an inconvenient industry. The one day this year (so far anyway) that he actually wanted to be home more than anywhere else, he was needed at work. So while he spends his day filling in three part forms on a typewriter he will be dreaming of the improbable Portland State/Kansas match. And while I dream of uncompromised playdates I will be snatching at tissue all day to stem the tide of snot. The snot promises to make us all feel better as it slowly evacuates. It will make us all feel better, if I can only keep it from attacking anyone else.

Since Sunday afternoon I’ve been suffering from a hybrid cold-sickness-gunk-thing. It would seem that sometime between the coffee break and the closing song in church I got filled up—shoulders to the top of my head—with rubber cement. The rubber cement came with a low grade fever–free with purchase!

I spent all of Sunday afternoon in bed. I didn’t have that kind of freedom Monday. I loaded myself up with cold medicine and did my best. I alternated between lying on the couch and sitting at the computer. When the computer made my eyes feel like theyhad taken an acid bath I would go lay on the couch. When reclining on the couch threatened to make me suffocate on rubber cement I sat up at the computer. I took very small breaks throughout the day to put healthy food into the children at their feeding times.

My only other activity for the last two and a half days has been fevered shivering shaking and dripping in sweat. Very pleasant.

Digging in the mommy drawer of the bathroom this morning I found some Dayquil. Dayquil! And only expired for two years! That made me feel a little better. I mean, if you ignore the headache from the rubber cement that is trying to split my skull in half, Dayquil and its sister medicine Nyquil can really make a mommy feel good. I feel so good, in fact that I think I will forbear to operate heavy equipment today.

I had one other opportunity for healing today. Putting the oatmeal in front of the children called to my attention our desperate need for clean dishes. There was no one else, no way else to do it. I took a deep breath. I established myself before the steaming sink and hoped that my germs didn’t find a home on every fork and spoon.

It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. The sink was steamy, which always feel good when stuffed up. When you get dizzy at the sink it is very easy to lean on the counter for a moment. While washing I got to listen to Clark Howard on the radio and be mad at monster mega banks and our wasteful government. What steam and little righteous indignation can’t fix, I don’t want to suffer from.

Housework is very physical work, but not entirely brainless.  The smarter you work, the quicker it goes.

Take for example, your sticky, grimey dining room chairs. You can spray them down and get to scrubbing but it will take forever. You’ll get tired. You’ll get mad at your kids, at that quaker guy on the oatmeal box, at our cutlure that insists we use chairs when we eat our food. Then you’ll be cranky and when the kids ask for a snack you’ll give them something disgusting but not sticky, like rice cakes.  Instead, you could spray your chairs and then grab a broom. When you are done sweeping the dining room and the kitchen your chairs will be all ready for you. The grimey stickiness will just wipe away, mostly. And in less time than the previous method you will have clean floors, clean chairs and a happy disposition. When you kids ask for a snack you might give them something yummy like a banana.  Much better all around.

This morning I have been contemplating one of my favorite housekeeping tips.  I call it Ten in Ten, which may be what it was called wherever I originally came across it.  It is simplicity itself. All you have to do is peek at your watch and say “I am going to throw away ten things in the next ten minutes.”  You can stop at ten things but I prefer to keep tossing for the full ten minutes.  Any room looks better after a ten minute clutter-removal spree.

I  have been contemplating it though because it sounds so un-green.  Throw out ten things? And more than once a week? Into our landfills? Say it isn’t so!But I think my habit of throwing out undesirable stuff can be changed.  After all, I haven’t put one single can into the trash since my first green post.

So it is time to do a Ten in Ten  green makeover.  A green ten in ten might look like this.  Grab two spare recepticles. Cereal boxes work for paper stuff. Put them down in the center of the room you are working in.  For example, my playroom. I welcome all of you to pop  over to my playroom and practice this. Anytime.

Okay, I’ve got a cereal box and a trash can in the middle of my room.  Time for the ten things:

1.  Chewed on and torn up coloring book page–into the cereal box.

2. Remains of the orange from snack time–hey, that’s not trash or paper! I run it to the kitchen and toss it in the kitchen compost pot.

3. Empty ziplock bag–into the trash–wait! I could use that again. Another run to the kitchen, where the sack gets to sit in the dish pile for a washing.

4.  Last week’s Sunday school craft–into the cereal box.

5.  The other kid’s Sunday school craft form last week–into the cereal box

6.  Gunky stickers stuck to the carpet–peeled off and dropped into the trash bin.

7. Cookies Norah just threw under the couch “for the ants” –into the trash bin. (I read somewhere you oughtn’t put cooked food  in the compost.)

8.  Plastic snack wrappers–into the trash bin

9: Blog notes–into the cereal box

10: Broken kids meal toy (this one happens to be from Arby’s and is paper)–into the cereal box.

Phew! much cleaner. The cereal box goes out to the recycle bin, the trash bin goes back into the bathroom.   In that short time I accomplished something, gave myself a cleaner room to type in, and made the home environment more pleasant for the rest of the family.

As it turns out, I only put three things into the trash can. Three things that had to go to the trash at some point.

Or–at is what would have happened if I was actually doing a Ten in Ten instead of just writing it down.

For those of you who like to get carried away in the moment, generally during a Ten in Ten I find myself picking up and putting away at the same time. At times it can be hard to find ten things that need to leave the house, what with toys and books everywhere. And so in reality, in ten minutes you can find yourself cleaner of the ten peices of junk and tidier too.

I’m off to grab a cereal box now and follow my own directions.

I’ve been out of University for seven years now. My professors would be very pleased to know that I have not stopped learning.  Lesson upon lesson upon lesson.  Yes, lesson is singular. I keep being taught the same lesson, over and over.  Which I would assume means I haven’t learned it yet.  This lesson is also the foundation of Christianity, so I am thankful that God hasn’t given up on teaching me yet. Everytime I am brought low, to a place of remorse, of needing to ask for forgiveness I am grateful that God hasn’t given up on me.

It is a simple process, each time the same.  I get in a scrape of sorts.  I get mad and mouthy.  Then I get sorry that the  peace has been  disturbed.   I complain for a while. Then I look deep inside, consider what responsibility I have in the situation.  Recognized, the responsibility sits on my heart for a time (sometimes a short time , sometimes  a dreadfully long time.)

When I finally see my own actions as the sin that they are, the hard part starts. I seek the party I have wronged (even if they started it! Even if they are bullies!) and I have to humble myself. No pointed comments in the apology, no double meanings. No sarcasm. When I can actually accomplish that, I say I am sorry. I admit how I have caused harm and I apologize. I do it no matter what the other party does.  It is no fun. But it is good. It is right.

And every time I go through that I think “This time I will remember not to pick a fight or escalate a problem with my ugly snide mouth.”  It would seem the last time wasn’t the last time.

It has been pointed out that I was mean spirited and hurtful in my comments about way back when when I was new to my church. Very true. I told myself I was…funny? descriptive? playing the roll of a mean person? But that was, of course, just a justification for sin.  I wanted to be mean and make people roll their eyes at the stereotype of pushy moms out of touch with reality.

I’m sorry. Of course the mom’s weren’t out of touch with reality. And they weren’t pushy either. They hurt my feelings a little, by some comments, but their comments weren’t meant to hurt, probably. No–no pointed comments.  They were just talking and sometimes things hurt my feelings and sometimes they didn’t.

I had no one specific in mind when I used unkind words to describe my peers.  However if anyone read that post who happened to go to our church back then could only infer that I had specific people in mind.

I met three single girls back in those days, who were old enough to consider Daniel a possibility.   Those three girls weren’t frumpy, dumpy or boring. Of course they weren’t!  What young girl full of bright ideas, happy heart, shining eyes, rosey cheeks, and sparkling smiles is ever unattractive? And not only did these three girls have youth and beauty to spare, they each of them, were and are intimidatingly brilliant and witty.

I apologize.  I really am sorry for adding to the sum of mean feelings and unkind words in the world.

I am glad I had the opportunity to talk about what God has been teaching me; I take too few of those opportunities.  But I am sorry that talking about it was spurred by experiencing it yet again.

This morning I got up around 8:30, because the kids thought that they had had enough tv and needed to eat. After our nutritious and flavorful breakfast (I had bran flakes. Yum!) We settled in for a morning of learning.

At this moment, the small people are learning something about…horseshoes? really? A musical number dedicated to horseshoes? I think I am missing something. But in the time it took to marvel at that, they stopped learning about horseshoes and started learning about pets. God bless Elmo’s world. Now I will get to hear all day about how Samwise ran away but tha’s okay because he bit and scratched and that girl has a pet hamster mommy and I really really want a pet hamster. Yes, all day. Because I feel it is important for the children to learn, I will sacrifice my mental health.

I sat down at the computer to learn how I have handled the finances for the last two weeks. Not too bad. We have spent about a fourth of out entertainment fund but all of our miscellaneous and grocery money. Not quite all the grocery money, but almost. The thing is, I have about a month of groceries on hand, I only need to buy new milk as I run out and should have plenty still written in for that. The misecellany funds, or the Queen’s Secret Funds as I like to think of them are more troubling. My interior renovations haven’t left much for me to spend on Easter candy. But wait! Candy? That’s groceries! All is still well. So I learned that we aren’t doing so badly. We have only spent a quarter of our gas money as well, so the month has a comfortable amount of wiggle room, it would appear.

I learned about that and I learned about my favorite bulletin board system and their upcoming changes. Not thrilled with them, but must have some modicum of perspective on the situation–there is more than one way to discuss baby names with an international consortium of brilliant women. We shall find a way to continue our good works.

I sit here, in my warm fuzzy good morning shirt (or housecoat.) I have a lovely little room we call a playroom. Back in the olden days, when I was a kid, I think we called this kind of thing the family room. We are safe and warm and comfy in here, a tv, computer, rug with pictures of fruit on it, and toys almost coming out of our ears. No, no, I am just joking I would never have toys small enough to go in ears. That’s dangerous. Oh, but those little things all over the floor are pony beads! Those aren’t toys! They are, um, learning tools! Yeah! Manipulating small beads increases their pre-writing skills, sorting the colors does something else for their brain and using them as toy food, medicine, people, aliens, and noise makers keeps me from having to buy real toys–I mean uses their imaginations. Yeah. Imaginations.

But we all have sacrifices in this world. Ours isn’t a veritable Eden of homelife. We have…can you bear it? Can you take the news? We have dial up internet. The story is too long, too dull to tell to friends so, I guess I’ll tell it.

There is no DSL on our street. Our neighbors range in age from 65 to 85 so Qwest’s little note cards they use to solicate interest return void. No interest. No DSL. Qwest DSL would be, I think $25 a month. Quite a investment for me–Netzero is only $9.98.

You raise your eyebrows, I know. How can I live, making that kind of sacrifice? What is wrong with me? havent’ I heard of cable yet? Well…yes. However, I just can’t make the numbers work. Watch and see. Netzero $10, qwest local and long distance $58 Tracphone pay as you only costs us $15 or so a month. That’s right. $73 a month in communication bills. I can’t create the cable package that would be as cheap as that. If I had DSL the total would raise for internet, cell, local and long distance to…$88. Is there anyway to have Cable internet and communicate telephonicaly for only $88? That would be cell phones and say, Vonage for only $33 a month. I don’t think I can make that much magic, do you? And if you are wondering, we have a digital TV which means more channels than we need already. If I had cable TV my head might explode.

I bring all of this up because as it would turn out, my sacrifice is your sacrifice. I have a lovely, bubble-y theme on my blog. And I quite like it. However, I can’t change the font of my posts. They appear to be written in a nice serify font like Times New Roman. But when they post they are small and sans-serify, sort of hard on the eyes, me thinks. Not clear and crisp like Ariel.

I would change this for you, I really would. But my theme is uneditable. I would just change themes, I would. But I have dial up. Do you know the kind of time investment theme changing is in dial up?

And so I speak of sacrifices. Here we are, communicating across the miles (Hi mom!) sacrificing with each other. Yes, I am a bit tongue in cheek here. We are warm and safe and fed and have any number of pleasant ways to spend our day that don’t call for walking miles and miles barefoot to bring water to the house.

I would still like to change the theme for a clearer font and next time I have a chance to sit with my brother at the fast fast computer I will do it.

By the way, Norah says now, “I have two pets mommy. A frog named Commie Sue. He’s a boy. And a pet Giraffe. But the Giraffe lives in my back yard. I could put on my boots and go feed the giraffe. I have to feed the giraffe (shows me the patty pan full of pony beads.) But he has to share with the baby. ”

It looks like today will be pet day for sure. God bless sacrifices.