25 Jun

dreary

Don’t tell anyone, but I didn’t do much work today. I have been feeling off. Not really sick, apart from this damn cough that has been hanging around for about a week, just… off. A little weak, a bit pathetic. It’s probably that I’m still so tired, proper coffee notwithstanding. So instead of doing proper work I did a couple of training courses and cleaned out my inbox. I feel good for it, but it’s bound to come back and bite me sometime.

Tonight I am off to help a friend with her business budget. I don’t know the first thing about creating budgets for businesses, but I am good at our budget and working out how to put money aside for everything we need. Remind me to tell you about that sometime, but not now because I am too tired. The last two weeks has been a ridiculous whirlwind. Luckily tonight is the last commitment in the list. Tomorrow night one of Dave’s friends is staying over but I don’t expect him to be much trouble, and then, oh then… I get to SLEEP IN. And I will. And oh, it will be bliss.

Maybe tomorrow I will be interesting.

24 Jun

reasonable grounds

Good lord I am tired. So, so tired. I feel like I haven’t slept in forever. This morning I caved and had my first un-decaffeinated coffee in weeks and it was like the clouds parted and rainbows spilled over the land. Now I want another one. I will regret it later but I don’t know if I can resist.

When I am tired, I get whiny. You know how little kids get when they haven’t had their nap? All grizzly and making you want to put a pillow over their face? That’s me on a Friday evening. Or, Wednesday morning this week. This morning Dave reminded me that our power is going out for 9 hours on Sunday. I remember him mentioning it on the weekend but I was rushing around trying to prepare stuff for his mum’s 60th birthday party and didn’t get the details. It’ll be out from 9am to 5:30pm or thereabouts. On a fucking SUNDAY. When I am going to want to sleep in and then have a shower and an espresso, and then, I don’t know, live my generally un-Amish life. So I didn’t react well and now he is all huffy because he thinks I’m blaming him for it, and I’m huffy because he got huffy when I am tired and he should understand, dammit.

So now it’s later and I’ve had time to think about it (remind me to tell you about the 20-minute rule, it’s ridiculous) and I guess there are ways and means for us to cope, but the point remains, I am tired and grizzly, and there is no hope of a nap.

22 Jun

lunch money

So the way Dave and I work the household budget, we each get a personal weekly allowance, which is for lunches, clothes, CDs, computer games – it’s pocket money, basically, and it’s there so we don’t have to answer to each other on buying stuff for ourselves and so we don’t feel deprived. Every fortnight the amount gets transferred to our own accounts from the main household stuff and that is the end of it, we can do with it what we want.

It’s a generous amount (probably “omg  how much?” to some people, but it fits our budget right now), and in theory should be more than enough for my needs, but I’m often running short. Sure, I occasionally buy stuff on the credit card [most of our spending is done by credit card, so I can control when payments are made],  but it’s the cash that baffles me.  I’ll take out $80 expecting it to last me all week and three days later it’s all gone. Where? I don’t know.  I’ve tried tracking my spending but I do as good at that as I do with keeping a food diary.

So, I’ve decided I need to do with my pocket money what I do with the rest of the budget, and break it into categories, or rather, two categories: Food, and Everything Else.

Buying lunch at work every day gets really pricey, then if you add in a morning coffee it gets ridiculous. I’m sure this is where most of my cash goes, from buying coffee and maybe a muffin and then lunch and maybe a bottle of diet coke – you could easily spend $20 a DAY. And I haven’t even mentioned the chocolate cupboard! It’s annoying because I could easily save that money by being organised and bringing in lunch, but it’s so much easier to just sleep in another 15 minutes and buy everything I need. It’s basically a fee for being lazy. And often what I buy is nowhere near as healthy as the stuff I could make myself.

So, this is what I’ve decided.

  • I will give myself a daily allowance of $3 for a morning coffee plus $10 for lunch (which is the cost of the piggy size sushi plate, the most expensive thing I’ll generally buy), which is $13/day, or $65 per week.
  • I’ll keep the lunch money separate to my other cash so it’s easy to track. I’ve gone wrong in the past by trying to keep it all in the one wallet, but I will need a bit of other cash and I need to keep this separate.
  • Whatever I don’t spend can be saved up towards the odd work lunch out, or even (gasp!) saved up for other things.

I’m so excited about this. It will force me to think about what I’m planning to eat, and also force me to start bringing food in from home instead. Once I’ve got used to the $13 allowance and all my options therein, I should be able to drop the amount. Even better, I should be able to drop my total spending allowance. We’ve been talking about doing this recently and though I usually tell Dave I don’t want him to feel deprived, I’m also worried that I’ll not manage to keep to budget if we reduce the amount. But I really want to reduce it. If we could trim say $50 a week off all our discretionary spending, that’s $2600 a year! I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have an extra $2600 than a year’s worth of old food wrappers.

How do you manage your discretionary spending? Do you give yourself a set allowance, or do you just spend whatever’s left over after you’ve paid the bills? Do you have any tips for managing grown-up pocket money?

17 Jun

biological

So as part of their employee care program, my work does these health assessment check things. Mostly they are soft alternative therapy things, like iridology assessments, a naturopath talking about the benefits of detox, that sort of thing. All very good, but there’s no follow up. Today we had biological age assessments. It was a 10 minute appointment with a naturopath, who asked me my height and weight then attached electrodes to my hand and foot to measure my electrical impedance or somesuch. Hey, we only had 10 minutes,  there wasn’t time for her to explain.

Anyway, the good news is my biological age is 29.9years and my cells are nicely plumped up and taking in “stuff”. But the bad news is my muscle mass is 44.8kg and my fat mass is 43.2kg! I am 49% fat! I used to have a body fat monitor in the UK and the last time I used it, it said I was 41% fat. Now I know it was a Special K one so possibly not the most accurate in the world, but still, that’s quite a percentage jump for only a couple of kilos difference in weight.

The other thing she said was I am very dehydrated, which I kind of realised as I think I only drink about 1litre per day. What you actually need is 30ml of water for every kg of body mass (um, about half an ounce for every pound). And for every coffee you have, you need 2 extra glasses of water as it is a diuretic. So I should be having at least 2.7 litres of water every day. Oh, and about 1700 cal/day, not “everything you can get your hands on”, which is what I’ve been eating now.

So there.

On the one hand I’m surprised and flattered that my biological age is so low, eight years below my actual! I mean, it’s not like I’ve done anything special to make it so. On the other, the rest of the data is sobering. I am to drink water and exercise to lose weight and gain muscle mass. I’ve been working on the water today and averaged 20 minutes between toilet trips. So I suppose it’s one way to get my daily step count up.

The thing is, this is all very interesting but not much use if we don’t get regular follow up assessments. I asked the naturopath if there were any planned and she didn’t know. But she did say she had a much more thorough and accurate test she could do at her offices, and she gave me a card. So that’s something to think about, I guess.

12 Jun

must do better

I’ve been in a funk all week since I went back to work. I’ve recently started moving into a new area at work because my old job isn’t there anymore and it’s not going well. I just feel like I’m not doing a good job, I’ll never do a good job, and I might as well give up and quit. Except I can’t afford to quit. I can’t even afford to be made redundant, not really. Oh, to win tattslotto or come into a massive inheritance. Sigh.

On Tuesday we had a presentation from this new whizzbang training area work’s set up. It’s all very high tech, fancy lights and projections on walls, and I’m sure they’re using all the latest tricks to help enhance the learning experience. All the things you hear cutting edge companies do, and it makes you mad that you can’t work in a place like Google or Apple or somewhere that makes you work hard, but treats you so well you wouldn’t want to do otherwise. Because you feel appreciated, what a concept. I’ve always wished our work would do that, but now they are I’m wondering, how much did all that cost, getting all those white milk crates to build the walls of that training room (seriously)? When we’re in a recession and always being told our costs too high. I wouldn’t mind if I thought the “cultural shift” they talked about would actually take hold, but I think it’s going to be another of those things that are flavour of the month for a while and then everyone just loses interest.

Ooh, get me and my cynicism.

In the presentation they said, this is going to be for our star achievers, and it sounds like it’s all leadership coaching for managers and executives and stuff. And I thought, I wish I was one of their star players. And then I thought, I used to be, when did that change? I was always top at high school, I live for praise for christ’s sake, when did I stop trying? When it got too hard at uni? But I was good when I first started as well. How did I get here? Where did this cynicism come from? And I really really wanted to stop it and get back to being brilliant again. I wonder if I can, so another thing to put on my list.

*

In other news, I caught up with my friend! After feeling bad for the past week and promising myself I’d email, he ended up contacting me. Which is always the way. We had a really good chat and laugh over a coffee.It turned out he’d been on holiday for two weeks so it hadn’t been that bad, we’d really only been out of contact for a couple of weeks, not a month or more. Still, the point remains, I didn’t know he was away and I didn’t get in touch.

Must. Do. Better.

Also, another place I do badly with contacting-wise? Email and comments. I’ve had some lovely contents on this blog (and a hell of a lot of spam) and I have not responded to all of it. Partly I’m not sure HOW to respond; my last blog is on Livejournal and it’s easy to respond to comments there. Out here in the open internet? Not sure of protocol. Do you expect a response to comments? By email? Anyway, you’ve said some lovely things and I feel like I should reply, and so I should. Sorry about that.

Remember: Must. Do. Better.

 

10 Jun

looooong weekend

So this past Monday was Queen’s Birthday here in Aus, meaning we got a long weekend, and the Thursday before was Dave’s Birthday, so we took that day and Friday off and had a really long weekend.

I was so excited about his birthday, I always am more than my own because I love to treat him, but even more so this time because I’d got him his Present to End All Presents, the Lego Millennium Falcon, which has over 5000 pieces and something like 3 foot long when it’s done.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What the?” and “OMFG that’s expensive,” and “why on earth would she buy THAT?” and I understand because I thought exactly the same things for years – years! – while he went on and on about it. In the end I bought it for him because it’s his 35th birthday so he should get something special, and on our wedding day he surprised me with an absolutely gorgeous pair of diamond earrings, which are shiny and beautiful and I love love love them. So I bought it for him. And yes, it is expensive, and completely blew our gift budget, but he paid for the earrings out of his personal spending money, so I’ve done the same here.

(The answers to your other questions, in no particular order, are: On the coffee table, apparantly; No, he only makes it once and then admires it in perpetuity (on the fricking coffee table); and no, there is no point to his life once he’s finished this, his life’s goal, so I guess he will be dying shortly. And the way I know what your questions are without asking is because I’ve been asking the exact same ones as well. For months.)

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01 Jun

the ebb and flow of friendships

I don’t have a lot of long-standing friends. I joke that my ex-husband got all the friends in the divorce but the real truth is that I’m just not that close to a lot of people, and not that good at keeping in touch with those that I am. So we separated, I moved overseas, and friendships lapsed. Not that there were a lot of people to keep in touch with. Acquaintances yes, workmates and pubmates yes, but real friends, no.
 
Blame it on being an only child if you want, or on a mother who is very insular herself. I just don’t have the knack. I find it hard to reach out and make friends, I’m not sure how to. How do I go about turning the idle chatter at work into lunch or weekend things? What would we talk about then? What if we don’t have much in common? And would they look at me weird if I tried opening up and told them what I really think about?

 This is why some people have blogs. On the net, no one looks at you weird.

>Dave on the other hand, Dave is different. Dave has a million friends, you can’t help loving him. I’m still not sure why he ended up with me. A lot of his friends are from back in high school and university, which is a completely alien concept to me, but they’re all still friends and most are long-time married with children. Needless to say they are all fantastic. There’s one group in particular that gets together whenever there’s a Formula 1 Grand Prix on, to cook themed dinners at each others houses. And not only are the guys really close, but so are all the girls. They all live reasonably close together and phone and email all the time. They visit each other when there’s a new baby. They know what’s going on in each other’s lives. It’s so strange to me. I love it.

As well as the GP dinners the girls also have a monthly craft night, which they were nice enough to invite me to, and I make sure I go to as many as possible. There was one last Thursday and I went along with my laptop and futzed around with this blog while we talked about kids and relationships and things. (Do you like the new theme? Isn’t the font a little bit small?) I was cracking jokes, as I tend to do when I have got over the Oh-my-god-these-people-might-hate-me shyness but don’t have a lot to say about the topic, thus disguising that I would be sitting there as a lump otherwise. One of S’s other friends had come along for the first time and at one point I made her laugh out loud.

“I forgot to explain about Nicky,” S said. “She has a wicked sense of humour.”

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