Since it’s been dead at work D-E-A-D dead, I’ve had lots of time to fantasize, dwell, worry, etc on just Life As We Know It. I’ve used the ol’ plate-spinning analogy before, where my plates are Family, Work, Body, Money, Brain.
Work is going well — the only thing I’d change would be to have a 4 or 4.5 day schedule, as I find that even having Friday afternoons off for summer hours makes a huge difference in how I feel about the work/life balance.
Body, I’m working on as well — I am back into the groove of Group Power and the Y and all of that, and watching what I eat (but have totally slacked on the WW tracking, because I suck. Well, that and the online tools kept crashing on me, so I stopped wanting to open them) and have lost about 10 pounds in the last few months, even though it’s the season of Ice Cream and Hamburgers. I am now a Regular at the Y, which continues to amaze me, and honestly makes me more committed to showing up. I even use the elliptical now! Yeah.
Money — I love wesabe, and am being good about updating that. We are saving (or, were saving until 1500 bucks of car repairs popped up the same week we paid 900 for four more windows) and we aren’t in debt, and that’s good. I am freaking the fuck OUT about heating our house this winter though — we’ve regularly used 450 gallons a season, and are hoping that the new windows (and thermal blinds I plan to get by winter) will make a difference. Maybe not in our oil usage, but in how warm and comfortable we are inside. But with oil approaching $5/gallon, that’s about 4x what it was our first winter, and it works out to about $375/month through the heating season, which is a lot. We don’t drive much, our commutes are 2 and 3 miles, respectively, so I’m not terribly freaked about that. i think September will be another no-buying month (August is Dave’s birthday, so that would hardly be fair…) just to stockpile some oil money and such.
Brain — It’s still weird for September to not be greeted with getting a parking pass at UM or figuring out my textbooks or whatever, and that’s weird. I also am trying to figure out how to WRITE again, which seems weird as well. I can barely get a blog post up these days (but I am twittering daily — www.twitter.com/snappity — if you’re a twitterin’ too, feel free to add me!) but I just feel so… uninspired. About everything. Not depressed, just… bored. Or something.
In all of that, I’m kind of trying to think of a way to bring in some more money, somehow, to be able to be saving more, to increase our cashflow, to have more of a safety net, all of that. I really, really, desperately want another child, but that can’t happen until Ingrid is on her way out of private daycare and into public schools, so our timeline would be to TTC no EARLIER than a year from now, which would get us a spring/summer baby (KNOCK ON WOOD) and a 4 year old, and one year of daycare costing $1200/month. Not to mention a mat leave — I’d take my 12 weeks, hell or high water, but I’m already planning to start stockpiling vacation and sick days, but even THEN, I won’t have enough to cover an entire mat leave, even if I didn’t take another day off for two goddamn years. That weighs on my mind, too.
When it comes to extra income, Dave and are both into it. His freelance gig has kind of dried up for now, and that was always good for him to use as spending money. Overtime for him picks up in the fall, but oil will certainly eat a pile of that, if not all of it. I do work for my folks in May and June (and a little shot in February), which helps, but it would be so cool if together, we could come up with $1000 of Other Money. Not from our current jobs, but from other sources. $1000 is about exactly our mortgage payment, and in my mental ledger, it would just be cool to cover that — our biggest expense, currently (and yes, 2 kids in daycare will cost more than our HOUSE) — and use our incomes for the other bills, and for savings. So, yeah. That’s a plate that’s wobbling.
For me, it ties up so many of the other ones — Family (could have a 2nd kid!), Money, Brain. I feel like I need to schedule something, some Writing Time or even time to update my local baby stuff blog. (Adsense has earned me 8 dollars in the last year. I’d love if that one could be self sufficient.)
So, dear readers, is anyone out there moonlighting? Supplementing? Anything like that? I don’t want to get a retail job (though the lure of another LLB discount is strong, I really don’t think I could hack the hours), but I’d like to set myself a goal to at least try to write more, even if it’s just “I’m going to take my laptop and disappear to an internet-free coffeeshop for an hour, once a week.” Or “I’m going to research how to write a query letter, or find a place that might be a good place to submit, or …. SOMETHING.” You know?