No Prizes for Me

Sunday, instead of remembering to post at 11:30, I remembered after midnight. I could have just gone ahead and written Monday’s NaBloPoMo post, but I was up till 4am as it was, and even a nothing post might have extended that. Did I mention that Mondays are a little crazy around here too? This Monday ended with me missing my normal evening appointment (group therapy) because my husband couldn’t watch Zebediah. Then I went to bed when Z fell asleep, at 8pm. Which means another late night tonight, sigh. Only three more night classes and a night exam and then no more until next fall at the earliest.

I haven’t decided if I will try to keep up with the rest of GloBloPoMo, or try to post at least once a week, or just slide into my recent near-abandonment of the blog.

How We Deal with Money, Part 1: His, Mine, Ours

We put all of our money in the common pot: joint accounts at the bank. There’s a cd in my name, just because I was the one who went in to renew it, but it’s part of the common money.

In a community property state, everything we earn now is common anyway, but I know people who keep funds separate or partly separate. One friend said, “but don’t you want a separate account, like so-and-so has, so you can buy things (like presents) without the other person knowing all the details?” Other people think it is important to have one’s own account. My friend who was denied access to a joint account while her husband was traveling would probably agree with this (I’m not sure when it happened, though she told me the story 20 years ago, but I know where–the state I live in now).

As with my desire for a relatively traditional wedding (friends in attendance, standing up and making vows, not done by the Justice of the Peace, and not done in Tijuana), my feelings on this are partly related to my parents. I remember seeing a list on the fridge at my father’s house, detailing who had paid for what recently. My grad school housemates and I had a list like that, but ours was just groceries and utilities, not the kid’s orthodontist and so on. It reminded me of one of the stories in the Joy-Luck Club, in which the daughter in the failing marriage has a financial list like that (am I confusing this with a story from Charlie Chan is Dead? The fact that ice cream is on the list of shared expenses even though the wife is lactose intolerant is a key part of the story…)

In our case, when we were going out, we put money into a kitty and used that to pay our restaurant bills, movie tickets, and such. When we moved in together a few months before getting married, we had separate accounts, and kept those lists of groceries and utilities and rent to split the costs. After we got married, we got a joint account. I kept my non-community property (pre-marriage savings) in my old credit union, which refused to give us a joint account becuase of my husband’s credit rating. My husband had debts rather than savings, so he doesn’t have a stash of pre-marital money.

My husband lost his job three months before our wedding. Aside from emotional stress and financial insecurity, I think this is a good thing to happen to a couple, because it makes it clear that both of you are in this together. A friend of mine in a similar situation (can you say “high tech crash”?) agreed. It is especially good if the person who loses the job is the one who usually makes more money (ie. the computer programmer, not the literature professor). He (especially if it is the he) gets to experience being the one contributing less money. And she (in our case at least) gets a feel for the stress of being a sole breadwinner for a while.

Anyway, since I do all the financial record-keeping and paying of bills, it helps to have things in one place, albeit multiple accounts.

Maybe it is good that I keep forgetting to post until almost midnight, or I would really ramble on about things.

Birth Certificates

How many placeholder posts can I get away with this month?

It can’t be good that I almost forgot about posting.

A couple of days before his seventeen-month birthday, I finally went and got Zeb’s birth certificate, so that I can get him a passport, so that I can take him with me to a conference in Rio de Janeiro. (Did I mention that conference? Fodder for another post).

For some reason I thought that the state would send us a copy of the birth certificate. For the record, my husband thought so too, so either we both misunderstood the birth certificate women at the hospital or they were mad at us for waiting till the last minute (a couple of days after leaving the hospital) to give them Zeb’s official name and somehow diverted the birth certificate.

I got my first passport when I was 13. We had to keep going back for one reason or another. The first problem was that the birth certificate my parents had wasn’t the official one, but rather the pretty one from the hospital. We don’t have a pretty one from the hospital either. We do have the option of paying $60 for a special “Republic of X Native” heirloom birth certificate.

For some reason, as I was wandering around a campus of state buildings with poor signage looking for the Vital Statistics office, I was thinking about how much worse this would have been in the last week of my pregnancy when I suddenly got to the point where it was difficult to walk. It’s a good thing you don’t have to get the birth certificate before the birth is what I am saying.

A Bit of a Placeholder

As I said, Wednesdays are long days around here, which means Thursdays we are all usually in recovery mode. A visit to the pediatrician and a few shots in the morning for one of us doesn’t help matters.

On Wednesdays, I usually leave the house at 9:20am and return between 9:00 and 9:30 pm (yesterday I got home at exactly 9:00, but usually it’s a little later). Zebediah is home with my husband all day, because the day care closes at 6:00pm, and even if it wasn’t crazy to drive back 30 miles to Capital City to pick him up, take him home, and drive back to work, I don’t have time in between my afternoon class and evening class to do it.

The good news is that there are only 4 more late Wednesdays left.  I hope and plan that by the next time I teach a night class (not next semester, probably next year), I will have another level of child care in place to handle things like this.

More good news: I found out I will have one course worth of release time next semester, so I will be teaching two classes instead of three. This was a surprise, because I’ve already had some release time for the project in question previously, so I didn’t even know it was an option for the spring until a week ago.

Bad news: As our chair reminded us in a meeting recently,  25% percent release time (I know, 1 course out of three is 33%, but there’s a little more to it than that) never really compensates for the work people are usually doing on the task that got them the release.  So probably, the release time will not actually give me more time for writing.

I might settle for more sleep, but if that happens it will have more to do with moving to 4 days of day care instead of the current two. Yes, currently my students (as represented by their work-to-be-graded) are disrupting my sleep more than the toddler, not that he is sleeping through the night or anything like that.

Now that I have written a long post to excuse what was going to be the shortness of the post, I will get back to watching an old episode of The West Wing.

Happy Day after Election Day

Now, that’s a US-centric title, but  on the other hand, the rest of the world has been following the campaign for as long or longer than most people here.

I’m very happy about the election results, but in no shape to write about them. Wednesdays are long days around here.

Highly Scientific Poll

My language students took an exam yesterday, and for the writing section I asked them who they wanted to win the presidential election.

Obama: 23

McCain: 16

Other: 7 (Other included Ron Paul, T.Boone Pickens, “my father,” neither and both)

It’s probably too late to be included in 538. Also, nobody cares about poll results from the Republic of X, because there is no doubt that our electoral college votes will go to McCain. McCain doesn’t even have a campaign office in the state, and Obama’s offices mainly work on getting volunteers to call or travel to swing states.

I would like to note, however, that in the past my students leaned heavily Republican.

Know Thyself

During the course of way too much time whining about analyzing my issues with procrastination in therapy, people have ocasionally suggested I just accept that I am a person who works to deadline. Then I get annoyed because I don’t want to be a person who can’t get anything done except under the pressure of deadlines. After all, once upon a time, I was self-motivated, self-directed, responsible and so on.

It is thus with chagrin that I note that I just finished a conference abstract so close to the midnight, Eastern Standard Time deadline that when, having successfully submitted the abstract online, I immediately clicked on the “submit a paper proposal” link (just to see if they were in fact giving people  a bit of a grace period), I got the message “Paper proposal submission deadline 2008-11-03 has passed.”  Apparently I got mine in with approximately zero minutes to spare. Sigh.

Speaking of deadlines, just in case parts of yesterday’s post were confusing, I wrote it in the wee hours of the morning, so when I said “today” I meant Saturday, even though I wrote and posted it on Sunday. I just wanted to clear that up in case I manage to get through the month and am up for one of those NaBloPoMo prizes. In the past, I ignored most of the stuff about prizes, but this time, I want to be in the running. Speaking of sources of motivation.

City Life

The towns I grew up in were similar in size to the towns I went to college and graduate school in. Not really towns, but small for cities. Some people hated Grad School Town, because it did not have the kind of cultural life or night life or whatever they wanted, basically because it was not New York or Chicago or San Francisco. Grad School town had the added benefit of being centrally isolated–at least Undergrad Town was just an hour or so by train from NYC or Philadelphia. Spring Town, where I lived the first four years after I got my current job is a similar size, and 45 minutes or so from Capital City (people will tell you it is a half hour, and that may be true for their commute, but to actually get to any destination, count on 45 minutes). Beach Town and High School Town did not have universities, so they lacked a lot of the advantages of college towns, but they had the Pacific Ocean, which counts for a lot in my book.

I realized when I listened to people complaining about Grad School Town that I was comfortable in towns that size. Also, I never had time to take advantage of the limited offerings College Town and Grad Town, so I figured I’d just be even more frustrated if I lived in New York or another great city, because I would be missing so many more concerts, plays, museums, nights out on the town, and whatever.

When I lived in Spring Town, I used to drive up to Capital City fairly often, to attend dances, to do research at Flagship University’s library to shop at Mega Natural Food Store or Fancy Gourmet Store, to see plays or film festivals or concerts. All of that got easier once I moved here, but I can also safely say that I miss out on all sorts of things, and did so even before Zebediah was born.

Nowadays there are some weekends where we don’t get out to anything, and just breathe a sigh of relief that we managed to get the grocery shopping done. This weekend, there were three events any one of which would have caused us to make a great effort to attend. Big Dance Weekend. Big Book Festival. Cultural Festival at which our Northern Celtic Nation dancing friends would be performing. That is not counting things we would  have felt less deprivation or guilt about missing: another book festival, the big Pow-wow, Day of the Dead celebrations, all the other normal performances, and of course the local natural attractions.

For a while, it looked like we might not make any of the above. Between Zeb’s choice of nap time and my husband’s tripping and hurting his foot, we missed the dance session we’d been planning to attend. At one point, our plan was to take Zeb to a playground and hang out there till it was time to meet our out-of-town dancing friend and Zebediah namesake for dinner.

Instead, we caught a tiny bit of the book festival, and went to the dance after dinner, although I did not actually do any dancing, since my husband couldn’t watch Zeb for me the way he did last year. I’d planned to ask someone else to watch Z for a dance or two, if he’d accept it, but for various reasons I didn’t.

I decided, though, that there is a certain value in the fact that Zeb went and had a wonderful time. Positive associations for future reference. He played (i.e. ran around) for a long while with a five and a half year old (who assured me that he could take care of Zeb, and it is true that I once had a babysitter who was only four years older than me, but that was when I was 9). He spent a lot of time going up and down staircases after that. I decided that if I want to dance, next year we will have to get a babysitter, and she can come with us but look after Zeb, or watch Zeb elsewhere and bring him over for a bit. That’s what the five-year old’s parents used to do.

All of which is to say that yes, I do get extra frustrated because of the sheer volume of things I do not do in this city on a regular basis, but we got in a lot today, even though we didn’t head out till after 3:00 pm.

NaBloPoMo

This may be crazy, but I am going to try to write every day in November. In honor of Thalia, I may tag it InterNaBloPoMo, though.

Just in Time to Alleviate My Guilt

I just read a post at Junkfood Science discussing studies about the relationship, or rather the lack of evidence of any relationship, between childhood sugar intake and obesity. Just in time, because after reading Thalia’s post about Cheerios, I was feeling a little insecure on the nutrition front. Not so much because of the Fancy Gourmet Supermarket Whole Grain Toasted O’s cereal (which we call Grouchy Os), but because Zebediah has informed me clearly though non verbally that [brand name redacted because it is too embarrassing] are currently his preferred snack food.  Now, I wouldn’t offer the stuff to him if I thought it was really evil. Moderation in all things. It is just unsettling when I am trying to be a good Ellyn Satter disciple (with handouts about healthy snacks from Child of Mine posted on the fridge) and offer him a variety of food, but, unlike one of his friends, what he loves best is not fresh fruit.  Of course Satter would probably say I’m messing it all up because I am still nursing, but I am the take-what-looks-good-ignore-the-rest kind of disciple so I just ignore that part of it.