Coping/Not coping

Rocket Boy has been gone for two and a half months, and I really thought by now I'd be coping quite well. I'd have the housework down to a system, I'd be reorganizing the house the way I like it, fixing the meals I want to eat, I'd have time for hobbies, the twins and I would be going on outings every weekend... Instead, none of that is true.

The housework is a disaster. I can't keep anything clean or organized. It is -- not surprisingly -- much worse than when Rocket Boy lived here. Part of the problem is that I still haven't gotten my sleep figured out, still not getting enough of it, though I have good days. When you're tired all the time, and you still have to go to work every day, you (that is, I) have no energy for housework. I work frantically to keep things from falling apart completely. I have a big weekly to-do list that I try to hack away at every day. Yet every day, things get worse.

Positive counter-examples: for every negative thing in this blog post I'm going to try to say something positive. So here are a couple of positive housekeeping things.

1. The toilet broke last week and I fixed it. Yes, that's right, me. At first the toilet was running all the time. It actually kept me from falling asleep one night, and the next morning it wouldn't flush (I had to use a bucket of water to flush it, shocking the twins). I googled "toilet running all the time" and discovered that it was probably a problem with the flapper, a part I was unfamiliar with. I texted Rocket Boy and he agreed that the flapper was probably the problem and gave me some advice on how to buy a new one. He claimed they were all alike and I could just buy a standard one. But this turned out not to be true. We have an old toilet and cannot use the new style of flappers. So I had to go back to the hardware store and get one we could use. The photo shows, on the right our old crummy broken one, in the middle the new one I bought that didn't work, and on the left the second new one I bought that DID work. It was hard to do this, especially since I also had to scrub out the filthy toilet tank, but the alternative was calling a plumber which would have meant I would have had to clean the bathroom first. So I did it myself.

I actually need to go back in and adjust the chain, so the job isn't completely done. But the toilet flushes and I did it myself.

2. I organized the twins' sock drawer. The twins share a dresser, and it's so big that for the most part I can just put Kid A's stuff on the left side of each drawer and Kid B's stuff on the right side, and the clothes stay apart and it's fine. But the top drawer is different. It's divided into two sections and we keep socks on the left and underwear on the right. The underwear stays put; the socks don't. Rolled-up socks are round and they roll, and the socks get all mixed up, and this is annoying early in the morning. So, I made a drawer organizer out of cardboard. Actually, originally I bought a ready-made drawer organizer at Target, back in March, but it was too tall for the drawer. That stymied me until today, when I googled "how to make a sock drawer organizer" and learned that it was very easy, you just had to cut up some cardboard. Of course, for that I decided I needed an X-acto knife, and for that I had to call Rocket Boy in St. Louis, because although I was sure we HAD an X-acto knife, I had no idea where it was. I assumed it was in a junk drawer, but we have a LOT of junk drawers scattered throughout the house. Rocket Boy had several ideas about where an X-acto knife might be (he claimed we had two), but it was not in the first two places he suggested. I finally found it in the third place (a drawer in the workbench in the garage) and then I cut up my cardboard and put it together to form a drawer organizer. As you can see, it's really crummy looking, but it does the job. I'm very pleased.

Back to the negatives.

Food is a much bigger problem than I thought it would be. I had pictured myself making simple, healthy meals -- small, of course, because Rocket Boy wouldn't be here to eat them, but nevertheless lovely. Instead, I have trouble putting anything on the table at all. Several times we've just skipped dinner -- around 7:30 or so one of the twins will say, "Did we have dinner?" or "What are we having for dinner?" and I'll say, "Um, we're not having dinner tonight, can you just eat snacks?" At first this upset them, but they've gotten used to it, and THAT upsets me as much as anything. Rocket Boy and I have always been so good about preserving "dinner time" and here I am ruining it. And then on the nights that I do manage to make dinner (or heat up something frozen), it's almost always an entree and nothing else. No side dishes. No vegetables. Once in a great while I'll manage to heat up a package of frozen veggies, and occasionally I'll put out a fruit, like slices of watermelon. But that's it. I can't think when the twins last had a piece of broccoli. I'm planning that things will improve in the fall, but we've got a long way to go. The truth is that I hate cooking, and when I'm struggling, cooking is hard to make happen.

Positive counter-example: The refrigerator (as you can see above) is full of fruit, with some veggies too. I can see some bell peppers, apples, an orange, and a sack of grapes in the crispers, and in the main part of the fridge there's a thing of watermelon slices, a thing of strawberries, a thing of blueberries, a sack of cherries... We also have milk, orange juice, eggs, cheese... We're not starving and I will pull myself together on this front eventually. I will, I will. I hope I will.

I guess I'll stop here -- it's my bedtime, and I'm not in the mood to write more depressing things about my lack of time for hobbies and how I never take the twins anywhere. Suffice it to say that this is all a lot harder than I thought it would be -- or maybe it would be more accurate to say it's exactly as hard as I feared it would be. But we're still here, the kitties too. The kids go back to school in two and a half weeks, and we're even planning a little vacation for right before that. And the toilet flushes (though I do need to adjust that chain). We're coping.

Money

Now that Rocket Boy is earning a good salary, we should be doing great financially. And maybe we are, I can't tell. There are several new expenses in our lives because of his job, of course: his rent, food, gas, the cost of flying him back to visit us every month or so, and next month we'll have to start paying $500/month on his student loans again. But even so, we still have more money than we did before, especially since we still have my part-time salary and the money from the rental house. So then the question arises: what do we do with that money?

The first thing I decided to do was start saving. We get $1440/month from the rental house and I have started putting $1000 of that in a regular savings account where I can get at it easily. It's not really savings, it's to pay our insurance and property tax bills, and whatever needs doing on the house. It's thus also meant as a sort of emergency fund, something we haven't had for a while. Last month I decided to start putting another $500/month in another savings account. I'm not sure what this is for -- maybe it's my new car fund or some such (my car is fine, but it's almost 12 years old). Eventually I'll probably put that money somewhere where it might earn a little interest, but I want to keep it liquid for now.

I don't know whether I should be stashing more money away. Probably I should be. If I made a budget I might be able to figure that out. But I've never really been a budget person. I have two basic approaches to money: (1) If I have very little, try to spend as little as possible. (2) If I have more than I need, then spend a little more and save the rest. Those are actually fairly workable approaches, but they do lack detail.

The one thing I am trying not to do -- and I don't think I've done -- is change our style of living, increase our day to day expenses. For instance, I haven't signed up for cable/satellite TV, even though we currently get almost no channels over the air. And the boys and I are still going out to eat only once a week -- mostly. I don't know if getting deli items or sushi from the grocery store counts as eating out. It's certainly not cooking. But anyway, I was doing things like that before our income increased. One nice change is that I paid off my credit card (I'd carried a balance for a year, starting with some expensive car repairs), and I will pay it off every month from now on.

A few things I am spending more on, and one of those is books. When I was younger I used to spend a lot of money on books, new books, not just used bookstore/library book sale books. Our house is so full of stuff that it doesn't make sense for me to buy a lot of ANYTHING -- there's no room on any bookshelf for more books. But I do still buy books -- carefully, now, because of our space issues -- and of course I use the library a lot too -- but I do still buy books. And now with more income I have bought a few in the last month that I wouldn't have bought before.

Additionally, I have bought some new clothes. My wardrobe is horrible, pathetic, partly because I keep growing out of everything, but also because I feel like I can't justify the expense of buying clothes for me. The twins, yes, they have to have clothes that fit and look decent. But who cares what I look like? My raincoat has a big rip right in the front and my winter coat doesn't meet around my belly. Though he doesn't outgrow his clothes, Rocket Boy is in a similar situation: most of his shirts and pants have been patched and mended. For Father's Day I bought him three new pairs of pants so he won't look like a homeless person at work. For my part, I had (until my recent shopping trips) just a few summer tops that fit, so I had to do my laundry every few days during hot spells. Now I am the proud owner of seven sleeveless tops and two sleeveless dresses (that fit), and I only have to do my laundry once a week. I also have a new summer nightgown, and I'm planning to work on the coat problem in the fall. Oh, and I ordered a new swimsuit. When I wanted to take the twins swimming I discovered that last year's suit doesn't fit (to be honest, it didn't really fit last year either), so I took a deep breath and ordered the next size up.

But there's another spending issue, actually somewhat related to the clothes thing, and that is that we haven't spent the money we should have been spending all along on our house and the rental, and thus there are so many things that need fixing. It would take all our money and more to do everything, so I've been trying to figure out a priority list. The first thing on the list was new gutters for our house -- but, as so often happens, that has had to be set aside. Our neighbor on the other side of the rental is very upset about the overgrown bushes at the rental, which he believes harbor the rats that he's seen on his property. So I hired the guy who both this neighbor and the neighbor on the other side of us recommended, and he's started doing a massive, almost unbelievable pruning job. Unfortunately I don't have a "before" picture, but just imagine this yard completely drowning in bushes and volunteer trees. They took all of that out this week, and now you can see the roses again! And the decorative rocks. And a lot of other smaller plants that have been in hiding for many years.

The guy is only coming by every two or three days (he worked two days this past week, about three hours each time), and we agreed that he'll bill me every couple of weeks, so that I keep close track of what I'm spending. He didn't try to quote the job because it's so massive -- the side yard and backyard are worse than the front. He'll just work along, and when he's done here I'll probably ask him to work on our backyard, because it's just as bad (our front yard is mostly OK). So after a month or two maybe it'll be time to think about gutters. Or maybe there will be some other squeaky wheel demanding grease, such as a failing major appliance, or maybe our rotting kitchen floor will collapse.

So I guess that's why a budget seems impossible -- we really need to just spend and spend and spend until we get the houses under control. I'm still going to set aside $1500/month, but other than that, I probably need to spend the rest of our earnings as soon as they hit our joint account. Whenever I miss Rocket Boy and wish I didn't have to be a single parent, I think about all the things we're able to pay for now, and that helps. A little.

Happy birthday weekend

I am 59! And thus beginneth the last year of my 50s. My 50s! I honestly still haven't adjusted even to being 50, and now I've got one year left until I'm 60. It's nuts. Is this how everyone else feels? Do all older people feel like this is some kind of joke? When I turned 30, I welcomed my 30s. I had heard good things about them. My 20s were very stressful, and I was ready for a change. And I really enjoyed my 30s, all the way through. Since then, though, I've had trouble. I felt that 40 sounded fat, 50 was impossibly elderly (considering that I had two-year-old twins at the time), and now 60 seems absurd. Well, I've got one more year to get used to the idea. Haven't enjoyed the first nine years of my 50s, so maybe the last year will be OK.

I had a nice birthday to kick it off. Longtime readers of my blogs know that I usually don't like my birthdays, but I did like this one. For starters, Rocket Boy came home for a visit. I'm really enjoying his visits, even though he and I do start sniping at each other eventually. But I feel a lot of stress ease off when he shows up -- for a little while I don't have to be responsible for EVERYTHING.

He arrived on Thursday, the 4th of July -- dead tired, because he'd had to get up at 4:30 to catch the MetroLink to the airport, and even then he almost missed his flight because there was a problem (a body) on the tracks and his train had to be rerouted. They held the airplane doors for him, but his suitcase came on a later flight. We had lunch at Great Scott's on the way home, but then he had to turn around and go back to the airport for his suitcase. Still, he was up for a barbecue on the patio that night, and even a quick trip up the hill to watch fireworks. He didn't save enough strength to play games with the kids that day, but there were games on the 5th, 6th, and 7th. Playing board games with Dad is one of their favorite things to do.

My birthday was Friday, and I didn't want to do anything special that day. We worked on chores, did errands, and ate a nice lunch out at the Southside Walnut Cafe. After lunch we picked up Kid A's new glasses and then went shopping for a new (bigger) bike for him -- something he badly needed and we couldn't afford until Rocket Boy got his new job. Kid B had expressed interest in getting a new bike too, but in the store he denied this, so we skipped it. I really hope he'll get back into riding -- he stopped several years ago after a bad accident -- but it's going to take more time. Kid A's bike is beautiful, kind of an orangey-red, and he LOVES it. When we got it home, he went speeding off on a ride, almost missing the Opening of the Presents.

I had ensured a good haul by ordering some gifts for myself -- clothes for my Barbie dolls. But it wasn't necessary, because I was so well remembered by my family. The kids (with RB's help) got me a lovely Barbie Closet, which included two more outfits and not enough hangers (my dolls have a lot of clothes). Rocket Boy brought me two iron garden decorations from St. Louis: a cardinal on a stick, and a red rose. I particularly like the cardinal (you can see it in the clump of flowers/weeds to the right of Kid B). My sisters were extremely generous with gift cards, and my older sister included some silly things like pudding mixes and little stuffed animals. Our next-door neighbor, Arlene, brought me a purple chrysanthemum, which I need to plant. Rocket Boy picked up a cake at the grocery store, we had leftovers for dinner, and there was an enormous, glorious thunderstorm, complete with hail the size of grapes! The streets flooded (briefly) and my flowers got smooshed, but they are recovering. My, I do love thunderstorms. The kids and I watched it from the porch (Rocket Boy and the cats, none of whom like thunderstorms, stayed in the house).

The goofiest part of the weekend had to be the Ridgecrest earthquakes, on the 4th and the 5th. Rocket Boy was sorry we missed them, but I wasn't. It sounded just awful, no power and no water in the desert in July. Trona, as usual, got the worst part of the deal.


Also this weekend, the reconstituted Grateful Dead (Dead & Co.) played at CU, so the city was crawling with out of state license plates and slightly-too-happy people. I decided my Barbie dolls were going to the Dead and did my best to dress them appropriately. They are all wearing sunglasses due to consumption of marijuana products, and Man-bun Ken is dressed like a crazy person because he took way too many drugs. Happiness is having enough tiny sunglasses for all your Barbie dolls to wear (though we did lose a pair when Rainbow Barbie toppled off the table, but I'm hopeful they'll show up).

Saturday was more errands and chores. Kid B had a birthday party to go to (just as Kid A did the last time Rocket Boy was home), so I had to drive him to Flatirons Crossing at 3:30 and then we picked him up at about 6:45. This made it hard to schedule dinner, but since Kid A said he wasn't hungry and Kid B had eaten pizza at the party, we left them alone in the house and went out to eat at Murphy's. We dubbed this a combination "paying off the credit card" and "early anniversary" dinner, since RB won't be home for that. In fact, right now he isn't scheduled to come back until Labor Day weekend (almost 2 months), so that will be a long stretch of aloneness. The kids will have been back in school for two weeks by the time he makes it home again.

So now it's Monday and I'm in charge of EVERYTHING once more. There's a real letdown after Rocket Boy leaves, but the sun is shining and I slept well, so I have some energy. The kids went to summer school (they have two more weeks of it) and I worked at home from 9:15 to 1:30. After school, Kid A rode his new bike to the library to play on the computers and Kid B came home to play on his computer here. (Sigh. At least they used their brains at school.) I have done the dishes and fed the cats twice, started a load of laundry and written this blog post. Now I need to do another cleaning task and decide what to have for dinner. After dinner I might do a little pruning and/or take a walk. Unless we have another thunderstorm, which would be awesome.