Have you ever...

Have you ever had a day that just felt wrong? You know the kind, where everything seems to be about half a bubble off plumb? Well, that is today. Just sitting around waiting for the ax to fall.

Not being able to sleep because of the stress, everything mechanical in the house acting just a little bit weird, the power twitching on and off this morning...it is gonna be an interesting day.

My husband is spending his time this morning looking thru job listings. Again. I will probably dig thru corners in the house to see if we have anything that we can sell. Hopefully the kids will do their chores this afternoon without griping too much about it. I might even get them to clean out their closets in the search of fodder to sell.

I need to find some big boxes. There isn't really any reason not to go ahead and pack some of this stuff up. Even if we do find a job and can stay, I have stuff in my cabinets that hasn't seen daylight in a couple of years at least. I think I will have another "if I haven't touched it in six months, it goes away" sale. At least that will give me an excuse to get rid of that dollar store skillet my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.

Outside the box

While trying to come up with ways to survive the coming lack of income, we have been trying to think out side the box. There has to be a way to make enough money to survive without selling your soul to do it.

Since I can't work for health reasons, that leaves my husband in a really tight spot. He is really feeling the pressure of having to support 4 people without a job. Stressful to say the very least. My kids, bless their thumpin' gizzards, are trying to be supportive of anything that will enable us to stay here. They are willing to eat pasta and beans forever if need be. My daughter wants to get a job so that she can make the house payment for us if we can't afford to.

Right now, we are investigating different ways to make a little bit of cash that doesn't involve selling insurance door to door or moving to Boston or California. Don't get me wrong, I am sure there are good things about those places, buried somewhere in the tax laws and history books, but I am a Southern Girl, born and bred. All of the family is here, and our cultural history is still strong in our family. Not to mention I don't want to walk into a restaurant and have another waitress look at our feet to see if we were wearing shoes after asking where we were from.

We have had a good run on the job front. 17 years working for the same company is almost unheard of these days. We have survived 6 lay offs, a couple of hostile takeover bids (failed) and my loss of ability to work. We have managed to pay off every single credit card we had (6 of the danged things), pay off the truck early, and still be able to eat well. We are probably in the best financial shape we have ever been in, at least until the ax falls sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Now we are looking into the possibility of delivering newspapers, setting up a website to showcase our state ( and sell related merchandise) and selling stuff on Ebay. Anything to make a few bucks. Hopefully, we will be able to make enough to stay put for a while for the sake of the kids.

I still want a place out in the woods. If we have to sell, that is where we are headed. But for the next few months, we will be looking for work "outside the box".

Well, that tears it...

Well, we have found out today that my husband will likely be out of work no later than January 28. The kids are devastated, naturally. At least we have been working toward a more self sufficient lifestyle lately. We only have the house payment and the utilities to deal with. Oh, and the medical bills. Always the medical bills.

Now we get to see what an out of work C++ programmer can do to support our family of 4. Since I can't work any more, he is our sole support. It is a good thing that I have learned to make due with less. I can now feed our family for about $6-8 a day, provided we don't get too sick of beans and pasta.

We will have to seriously cut back on the meat that we eat and we will be a lot more careful in our grocery purchases. Fortunately I can cook and know how to use herbs and seasonings to highlight a bland meal. Maybe this will give a chance to eat healthier, you know, make our calories work better for us. At least we will not be buying sodas again for a while.

Resolutions? Or lifestyle?

I sometimes think about the futility of New Years Resolutions. We all take the time to think about things we want to change in our life. Lose weight, exercise more, eat healthier, stop smoking, take more time with the family, etc.

I think I will just not make resolutions. If I decide something needs to change in my life, I just need to change it. Why should I wait until New Years to start? This is especially true for health issues. Every day you put it off is one more day that you are unhealthy.

I have started a different type of change. I am on a quest to spend as little money as possible. I have a goal to buy a small farm in the hills. To be able to do that, we will have to save every penny we can.

So far this goal is going fairly well. I have cut our grocery bill by about one fourth, cut our electric bill by almost a fourth, I have made soap and laundry detergent ( way cheaper), I have only bought bread once in almost 3 months ( making my own bread), and making the meat we have been eating go alot farther. I even have a tiny little garden for a few select high yield veggies like beans and tomatoes. My daughter bought me a canner for Christmas so I can put up my produce. Yet another savings.

My kids have sort of gotten into the spirit of the change. My daughter is really into the saving money thing. My son just likes the home made bread. Neither of them wants to move to a farm. Oh well, we can't have everything.

My husband is all for not spending the money. And he also wants to move to the hills. It took me a really long time to convince him that you just can't feed a family of 4 on $200 a month. He started going to the store with me when my Arthritis got so bad I had trouble lifting some of the packages. Now he knows just how expensive it is to buy groceries. On the plus side, he does like garden fresh veggies and he doesn't mind eating a lot of beans and pasta. Fresh bread is a plus. He loves me so he humors me in my sometimes crazed search for the almighty bargain.

I really want that farm. And there is a lot of work going into getting it. If it takes a lifestyle change to get it, then that is what will happen.

A New Year

Well, it is almost New Years and It sort of makes me think about things. Things I used to take for granted. There is so much in my life that I have been blessed with. A loving husband, a couple of really good kids, a home, good friends, enough healthy food, and all of us have enough money to get by on. It makes me realize that there are thousands of people who don't have those things.

I think about things like that every now and then. I try to donate to the food bank and homeless shelters when I can. I give any change I have to the Salvation Army when I see them braving the weather outside of a store. Then I got to thinking about what these folks do the rest of the year. Why should charity and goodwill only be at Christmas? Don't they need things the rest of the year too? Why should giving only be a last minute tax shelter?

I am sure they will need things all year. I do. I have to make the effort to do more the rest of the year. I may not have much by some standards, but compared to others, I have everything.

Why I hate shopping

I had to take my daughter shopping last night for a Secret Santa thing they do on the Newspaper staff at her school. A small gift every day for a week with a bigger gift ($5) on Friday. The kid she was supposed to buy for has been in the hospital for 2 weeks with histoplasmosis. She doesn't know him that well, and he wasn't there to write down the stuff that he liked/wanted, so she is having to wing it.

So after I drop off my son at scouts, we go to the Mass Merchandiser to try and find something for him. We walk around looking at all of the crap on the shelves, realize that it is all crap, and wind up getting a Pez dispenser and some assorted candy. She will be giving him a can of Pepsi one day as well. We decided that for the Friday gift, I will just make up a candy/cookie tray. Lame, I know, but at least it is heartfelt. For the Monday gift from her Secret Santa, she got a tube of chapstick. Kinda makes you wonder just how seriously these kids take it.

Anyway, there is just nothing out there is in the wide world of shopping that I either want or need. I have what I need already. Looking at the shelves in the stores just depresses me. Over priced, cheaply made, over packaged, and much much over advertised crap.

If someone actually wanted to get me something I would like, get me a side of Beef. That, I could use. Granted, it wouldn't be terribly practical to wrap and put under the tree, but you could always wrap it and put it in the freezer with a note under the tree.

It just seems that merchandisers are trying so hard to get every last dime from consumers, that they over look the need for quality. And the manufacturers that do believe in quality price their stuff so far out of the range of the normal consumer as to be a joke. So again, we are just bombarded with crap and told to like it. Well, I won't do it!

No more cheap, plastic, slave labor, Chinese, mass marketed crap will be bought by me. I will be looking for small businesses that produce American goods from American materials to stock my home. I will not be supporting MegaMart in their efforts to destroy small town America, I will not be supporting the Chinese government in their efforts to infiltrate the United States through our Capitalist greed, I will not bow down to the advertising agencies and spend more than my income for a holiday that is supposed to promote Peace, Love, and the birth of a Holy Child.

This Christmas, I am going to make it about caring, not about money. The few gifts I have to buy will be meaningful instead of pricey. It isn't about how many gifts, or how much they cost, but what that gift will mean to the person who gets it.

I am done with the shopping just because it is Christmas.

I hate Christmas

You know, Christmas really, really sucks. There is nothing quite like knowing that whatever you give someone for Christmas will be exactly what they don't want/like/need. So as a nation, we all flood into the shopping malls and MegaMarts, picking up things only to put them back, in a frantic search for the "perfect" gift.

I have decided that there is no "perfect" gift. Inevitably it will be the wrong color/style/size/ brand, break the first time it is used, or just be something that they cannot possibly use. Last year, I gave my husband a foot massager that he had been eyeballing every time we went into the store. He would rub on it, and exclaim over it, and wish they made it in bed size. I bought the last one in town. I couldn't wait for him to open it. It broke the first day. I was devastated. As a companion to the foot massage, I got him another massager that would fit his office chair that had heat and massage. Very nice for about a week until it too stopped working. It was at that point I decided that I would never buy anything that plugs into a wall as a gift again.

I gave my dad a bat house last year. As weird as it was, he liked it. He then proceeded to build himself about 5 more. It seems that the stranger the gift I give my dad, the more he likes it. At least he is kinda fun to buy for.

My kids, or at least my daughter, stress over what to give as gifts too. They never seem to have enough cash at hand to give the things they want to give. So the gifts always seem a bit lame. I remind them that Christmas isn't about the gifts, it is about the giving. They look at me like I have grown an extra head or something.

This year, my daughter, bless her pea pickin' heart, has decided to do artwork for charity. She has some talent for cartooning so she has been drawing anime' like pictures of her friends for a minimal amount of money. She said that every dime of it will be used to buy necessities for the teen shelter in our town. So far, she has collected $9 and has commissions for about $25 more. Somehow, I think I did good with that kid.

Then, of course, there is the whole Family thing to do. If you want to see just how much I am looking forward to that, see the Thanksgiving post. It will be all that and then some. At least this year we have managed to make a deal with almost all of the family members on both sides to not exchange gifts. Except for the kids. That works for me just fine. There is no reason for all of us to spend money we don't have just so we can swap crap. We had a small problem in that I had already bought a gift for my step-mom. My dad bought it from me to give to her. Problem solved. He got a gift to give her that he didn't have to shop for, and I got to give her something that I know she actually will like, even if it didn't have my name on the "from" tag on the box.

All in all, Christmas just sucks. I would much rather stay home, cook a nice meal for my husband and kids, watch a movie, and relax.