Springing

SAVINGS BY THE JAR

Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions. ~A.A. Latimer  

That day I got married, I had  a car, a few pieces of furniture that had been given to me, a total of $6.37 in my checkbook, and possibly fifteen cents in my pocket.  I suspect this was an unpleasant surprise to my brand-new husband.  I had worked part time for years, and full time for 14 months.  So what could have happened?  Clothes, shoes, rent and utilities, car payment, my half of the telephone bill, round trip tickets from Spokane to Billings.  A home-sewn satin wedding dress and bridesmaid dress, shoes, invitations.  My mom taught me how to balance a checkbook as soon as I got my first paycheck, but the savings part had completely escaped me.

I was broke.  Very broke.  And I quickly learned how it was done.  My first post-wedding shopping trip to Billings elicited shocked semi-silence and raised eyebrows.  Forty dollars for a pair of shoes?  I entertained myself with a shopping trip in Powell while he worked one Saturday morning.  Fourteen dollars for "dried weeds" for arrangements for the wall?  Seriously....I'd spent nearly all of his earnings for the day.  Well, I must say, i was learning.  Painful lessons, though they were.

When his paychecks started bouncing, he didn't know what to do, but I did...start a business!  Nothing to it, right?  Within three months we bought our own home, started a business and we were expecting a baby.  There was a lot of building going on in Cody but do you think we could manage to get a bid?   From April to December, we made $5,000 to report to the IRS.  The accountant advised him to find a job.

I found out what my husband did when he was worried.  He paced. The floor. In circles.  And he came up with a plan.  We became the owners of a lime green sewer cleaning machine, by which our bread and butter is placed upon our table to this day, although it's several shiny, new, sewer machines later.

His mom worked for an accountant and she came one Saturday to help me set up a bookkeeping system.  Double entry, by hand, back in the day. An evening class at the high school gave me a better handle on debits and credits.  Jerry planned to save 15% or more of our income.  Whew.  I really dragged my feet about the idea of a budget, and thought saving 15% was pushing it, but there was no winning that battle, so down to the penny we added income, subtracted expenses, budgeted our groceries and saved our dollars, month after month, until I got it, this saving business.  Four hundred to five hundred dollars per month on groceries, forty dollars for insurance, one hundred for utilities, and found great deals at yard sales on Saturday mornings.  Did without things we needed, so we could have a few things we wanted, and made our car last 10 years.

There was very little money to afford any extras, so we bought new work socks one month and a gallon of varnish the next.  We couldn't afford the mortgage payment, so we sold the house, made $10,000.00, sent 20% to Uncle Sam and invested the rest in a house in town with a rental unit next door, to help make the payment.  Along the way, we learned that some shiny brown tiles on a good sale, a new pendulum light,  and a couple sets of fluffy, yellow towels make a beautiful difference in a bathroom, but the perfect shade of blue paint is very hard to find.

 We started a remodeling project, and finished it to move into another house, and start again.Jerry said, I'll do whatever you want, if you are patient.  That was the fine print.  

Bought another house, lived in it, rented the old one, fixing up as we went.  Jerry learned electrical wiring, sheet rocking, and concrete work.  I learned how to rescue carpets, sometimes, paint without making a huge mess, usually, and clean a toilet to a shine every time.   So we bought another, cleaned up the smoke coated walls and ceiling, and turned it into a duplex.  Too busy for more houses, said I.  So we saved....$50,000 became $150,000.  I thought we should take some of the cash out for a family vacation but finally coaxed him into letting me spend $6,000 for a new kitchen.   The rest disappeared along with a recession or some such thing, big stock market adjustment.  But mainly we were happy, counting our blessings and having fun.

Then along comes a free offer...Millionaire Mind Intensive.  We went to Billings, or was it Denver, and learned.  How to budget more happily.  Yes, says Harv.  You must have a budget, a plan.  But to my great delight, that budget included some fine tuning:  10% to a play account, 10% give, 10% investment/financial freedom to build wealth, 10% Education, 10% Long Term Savings, and 50% necessities.  Love it.  Finally, some fun.  

Life is a dance...you learn as you go.

  

Ever notice how it’s a penny for your thoughts, 

yet you put in your two cents? Someone 

is making a penny on the deal! 

Stephen Wright

Money can’t buy happiness; 

it can, however, rent it.

Business is the art of extracting money from another man's pocket without resorting to violence. 

~Max Amsterdam~ 

At the Pump

                                                                                 

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves." 

- Albert Einstein

There are people who have money
 and people who are rich.
 ~Coco Chanel~

Vitality

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force - that thoughts rule the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Take time to pet the kitty..."

The Evening 

And the Morning

...were the first day of Spring!

Aha...I thought there would be more winter, but 55-65  degree weather
for a week just about had me fooled.  Just about.  I was highly suspicious we
 had more winter coming.

Noun

1.

vital force - (biology) a hypothetical force (not physical or chemical) once thought by Henri Bergson to cause the evolution and development of organisms elan vital, life force, vitality biological science, biology - the science that studies living organisms force - (physics) the influence that produces a change in a physical quantity; "force equals mass times acceleration"

Noun

1.

vital force - (biology) a hypothetical force (not physical or chemical) once thought by Henri Bergson to cause the evolution and development of organisms

elan vital, life force, vitality

biological science, biology - the science that studies living organisms

force - (physics) the influence that produces a change in a physical quantity; "force equals mass times acceleration"

Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2011 Princeton University, Farlex Inc. 

            vital force

 

                              noun

                          the force that animates and perpetuates living beings and organisms.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vital+force?s=t 

"I urge you to practice acting in spite of fear, practice acting in spite of inconvenience,

 practice acting in spite of discomfort, and 

practice acting even when you’re not in the mood."T. Harv. Eker  

Winter Hangs On

Yay for the Dump Run! Yikes, got an ow-wee from a sharp piece of tin.

Inside Work~the area being built for a laundry hookup.
(Taking more time than anticipated, as usual.)

Lenience will operate with greater force, in some instances than rigor. It is therefore my first wish to have all of my conduct distinguished by it.
George Washington

Okay...thinking about this statement.  What did he mean exactly?  

Aromatic Basil

      Had a visit with my daughter this week about eating.  Because I'm a mother, my kids' nutrition has always been my business, and while there's not much I can do about it these days, I am still very concerned. When she's been training for a marathon, she is aware of "tasting" a meal that she's eaten 4 days before.  The stress of running is nicely balanced by the great endorphin's, the result of accomplishing a sufficient level of effort, when your body relaxes with a sort of "ahhh!".  How much better when combined victoriously with healthy eating!  The goal!  Ahhh!

        Jerry loves ice cream and has a bowl of it every night, and it doesn't seem to have a negative impact on his weight. In fact, he's taken his belt in three notches in the last couple of years which is completely annoying!  Sometimes I think if he gets a treat, I should too!  He tries to help by reminding me that I don't "need" a snack.  Having been a child who experienced some "food battles" at the table, having someone tell me what to eat leaves me slightly out of sorts!  "I do it myself!"

        Food battles are still on! One of my kids is listening, and two of my kids expressed strong opinions about so-called fad diets, both skeptical and negative, translating to NO support for the Paleo Diet from them.  I understand skepticism.  I'm quite good at it myself.

      Food was a battle in our house, one which my dad usually won.  Mom was often weighing in at TOPS or Weight Watchers, while Dad served milk shakes, adored homemade bread and rolls, and at the table insisted we eat what was served.  Our taste buds were "refined" as children's often are, and we weren't open to much variety, and definitely turned up our noses at healthy food.  I don't suppose that gave Mom and Dad much confidence in our choices.  

     Having our own homes changed that.  My sister and I were both the chief cook, so we had to expand our food repertoire.  Betty Crocker...how many "mom in the kitchen" daughters has she taught to cook?  Can't blame Betty Crocker for a monochromatic spread of  pasty, pale biscuits, and grainy homemade macaroni and cheese casserole that I served one evening.  It was just that I had been through the cookbook and was running out of new ideas, after three weeks of cooking every day. Eventually bought a Natural Foods Cookbook. Bean-stuffed Eggplant sounded interesting, but we could hardly eat it.  There are other recipes these days.  Love Cooking Lite.  It's not always "Lite" but almost always good.

      Then my sister started cooking really new things, gourmet style food, beautiful dishes with elegant presentation and, to my mind, expensive.  She lost me there. I wasn't ready for goat cheese, arugula, and Brie. Especially when my kids wouldn't eat it and I didn't know how to pronounce it!

     I settled on some tasty favorites, like tacos, and hamburgers and fried chicken, and found recipes for a few things we liked in restaurants, Spagetti Carbonera Magdalena, and Chicken  Vernonique'.  Jerry wasn't a meat and potatoes type of eater, but loved casseroles and chinese food, especially Sweet and Sour Pork, and Lemon Chicken.  I like Mandarin Beef and Rice Pilaf and my mom's Soy Glazed Chicken.  I began experimenting with soups to save grocery dollars, and learned to eat Split Pea Soup, and to tolerate Ham and Bean Soup and to pass on Lentil Soup. I fixed chicken doused in flour and fried in shortening, southern-style with potatoes and gravy, then using the leftover meat in a stir-fry, and finally cooking the carcass for Chicken Noodle Soup.  Imagine the satisfaction of extending a $4 chicken for three meals for five people! 

       I was becoming more uneasy about warnings we kept hearing about prepared foods, and I didn't want my kids eating things that might have unpleasant hidden surprises, so I made the bread for sandwiches and baked from scratch and cooked our own meat.  I tried to master cinnamon rolls like Grandma, but it was one failure after another, besides they dried out too fast.  I gained "fluff" that I didn't want anyway, so gave up on cinnamon rolls.  We ate whole wheat homemade pancakes with butter and syrup every morning.  I'd never been at my ideal fitness and weight, and I was always "dieting", mostly with little real success.

      Then we went to Europe, and I discovered chocolate.   I started a quest for the perfect piece of chocolate, and despite plenty of effort, I have yet to repeat the tasty, mouth satisfying, zing of truly great chocolate.  Thinking that somehow the smooth melting of the perfect piece of chocolate, if I could find it, will somehow relieve the pressure of an emotional emergency, the quest became an act of repeated disappointment!  Telling myself that a reasonable substitue will suffice, I reach again and again for chocolate, melting many different brands on my tongue like a wine connoisseur.   It works...at least for a couple of minutes, until the super-duper guilt trips appear.  How is it I don't remember that part when I'm indulging?  I heard about Krispy Kreme Donuts. Their stock was soaring, business was growing, and I had to try one and see what the fuss was about.  Well, sure enough, they were pretty good.  Soon I was indulging every time there was an opportunity, over my husband's derisive heckling, and thinking it was a trend that couldn't last.  Too many unhealthy calories.

       I did  a type of Zone Diet while doing Crossfit, and that went great for awhile. Can't eat donuts and do Crossfit, can you?  Jerry is very interested in any information I can share with him when I learn new things. I can talk for hours and he'll listen and implement almost any new idea.  The latest "new idea" that we are discovering has to do with genetically modified food, an issue that I'm finally taking seriously. This topic comes up in conversations, and there are plenty of highly uneducated, mostly unbalanced opinions.  I recently downloaded Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis on my Kindle. His experience indicates that genetically modified wheat is causing a lot of problems for people.  Well, that's pretty straightforward. right?  So what's the problem here?

   Eating tacos with a wrap of lettuce leaves instead of a soft, white, tortilla shell tastes clean and good, and makes me feel better afterwards. Okay, it might not be that old familiar, warm, soft shell.  I just have to deal with it. Leaving the bun off the hamburger eliminates the bloat and makes me feel victorious!  Don't miss it, except while I watch Jerry enjoy his.  I will endure those few moments and emerge victorious at the gym. I can make a salad in a jar, and cut up extra celery and carrots for my snacks when I put them in Jerry's lunch.  Something quick to grab and go...instead of making peanut butter and honey on a piece of whole wheat bread and downing it with a glass of milk because there's nothing easy and quick when I've been focused on my work all morning and didn't want to stop for lunch, and NOW I'm hungry.

     

           Recently I learned that when we want to lose weight, that we often think we need to get more exercise, but that what we eat is 70% of our problem, and exercise is 30 %. I also picked up the interesting information that in Okinawa, they practice Hara Hachi Bu, which means "eat until you are 8 parts full."   Eighty percent full.  I can do that.  Hara Hachi Bu.

    The best motivation is seeing my daughter struggle with food issues, and keeping up her running. She goes from getting up at 4:30 a.m.,  not having a lunch break during the day, to arriving home famished at 6:30 at night, to eating late, because preparing meals takes time!  She spends a lot of time with people she enjoys, and who can't live without sweets.. It's just a great reminder that I need to make my own decisions about what fuels my body, and what is good for me.  We can make choices. I can make the right choices!  I have...in the distant past, eliminated sugar from my diet.  Felt great.  Can do it again.

  

The desire to heal and the enthusiasm should be there all the time. The idea that "I can do it" should be totally eliminated from your mind. There is a time when you will feel secure with your knowledge, and that is the time when you start losing it.  GeorgeVithoulkas

http://www.vithoulkas.com/en/writings/2161.html

Baby Blue Skies of Spring

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sonnet XVIII


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
~William Shakespeare~

FTD delivery from Mindy

East Morning Glory

Southern Response

Favorite dish from my sister:

Canned tomatoes, sliced, Olive oil above and below, sprinkled
with sea salt and basil.  Smoked on the grill several hours or in
the oven at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.
  Turn occasionally. 

Candied Tomato Slices

Beat One Egg...

One egg crepe.

Filling is whatever is on hand.  I used candied tomatoes,

 chopped spinach and Parmesan Cheese.

Also very good with fresh basil and crab.

                                                                                                     

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. 
Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."

"

Saturday Multi-tasking.
On the way to the gym on Saturday morning we picked up this piece
of pipe at the shop in town, and also part of a tree that had blown down.
 We needed a red flag and didn't have one.  Yellow caution tape and orange spray paint did the trick.




                                                                              


 Also burned ditches...what a nice day...and worked on putting in plumbing for a washer and dryer at the rental...he's so productive!

THE SILENT TREATMENT

A man and his wife were having some problems at home and were giving each other the silent treatment. Suddenly, the man realized that the next day, he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 AM for an early morning business flight.

Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and LOSE), he wrote on a piece of paper, "Please wake me at 5:00 AM." He left it where he knew she would find it.

The next morning, the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00 AM and he had missed his flight. Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn't wakened him, when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.

The paper said, "It is 5:00 AM. Wake up."

Organizing is what you do before you do something,
so that when you do it, it isn't all mixed up.
A.A. Milne

 What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork. 

Pearl Bailey

Kiwi, banana, cottage cheese, a splash of milk,
spinach, honey.
Saturday morning-after-workout-
blender-breakfast.
Jerry thought this looked like something 
unmentionable, not unmentionable to him, but
unmentionable to me.  He was pleasantly surprised
 when he tasted it. :)

87. Cuddle together under a full moon on a clear night.  

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

That's Life

"A woman might as well propose: her husband will claim she did." - Edgar Watson Howe

Morning Light

Lots and lots of water heaters...Jerry says they're paying around $75 a ton at the recycling place for water heaters....now just have to get them there.

Hitching up the horse trailer and taking a load of water heaters to the dump or recycler is probably something I should be able to do, but first off, I haven't gotten it figured out how to back up a trailer. 


Second, I have seen various close calls with the canal, which is very close to where the horse trailer is parked. Tractor took a dive head-first in the canal, also the roll-back truck slid off in the mud and had to be pulled out.

Third, once you get the thing backed up the driveway, there's a canal and two fences on the lane to steer through backwards.  Sounds like an obstacle course to me.  Guess that's why you're supposed to practice out in the field.

I read about a guy this week who made it a goal to work on one of his fears every day for a year. I wonder how that would go over with Jerry, if I decided to try it.  Makes me giggle. Maybe I should try it and see!  But I know for sure I'd better ask for permission, first, and get some instructions.  I think it would be really scary, and a lot of fun once I did it.  Woo hoo...makes me shiver!  


I guess that's why we have water heaters laying around.  At least they're not out on the hillside where you can see them from the highway, like they used to be.  Maybe I should think about loading them into the Toyota pickup and taking them in a couple at a time.  Or not.

Sky Blue Water

Hold it right there....
Ahhh!

Smelly old thing, and he wanted to drag it home!

Spring Run-off

   Three times this week, Shep has been found walking down the highway, in the middle of the road, cars whizzing by.  Once we drove to the neighbor's house, a couple of miles up the road, and picked him up.  Once I went to town and picked him up at the vet.  And the third time, a kindly neighbor, whom I had never met, brought him home to me, and watered the horses, too. 

   Seems I've been somewhat distracted lately, trying to focus on taxes, and he's been bored.  When I picked him up at the vet, he was perky and happy, interested, excited, and grinning with pleasure. And he promptly ran into the wall.  Relieved that he was safe, I couldn't scold him, but have been trying to remember to tie him up or keep him in the house with me.  When the weather was nice enough, I took him with me when I went running up and down our lane, but he doesn't seem to understand that he has to stop at the highway and come home.  So today, we took a drive in the dog-mobile, the Toyota pickup, and he showed me over and over again just how happy he was to go out to play!  Fourteen years old, but exploring and playing in the water like a pup! 

Springy fun, quilting project started.  
Raised the rent on one of our rentals 
this week and the folks decided to 
move.  Going to be a project, we think.  
Going to make it hard to get to this one for awhile.  
But it sure is fun and relaxing!

                 So, the last time we left for Arizona, we had a flight to catch out of Billings, and Jerry always likes to  take a little ( a lot) of extra time, since these few extra hours are some of his rare hours of not working, although I haven't figured this out yet. He's pretty sure he is one of the husbands who spends more than 40% of his life waiting for his wife to get ready.  In fact, the way he's adding it up, we are at 60 to 70% and gaining.

            About 6 a.m., he comes running in the house as I am finishing up my packing and getting ready to go..."The horses are missing!"  Now, I don't think you want the whole story, but they'd gotten out a couple of times in the few days prior to our trip, and I thought I had plugged off the escape route, but since I clearly hadn't, I hastily threw on my coat, and zipped up my boots, which were handier than tying tennis shoes, and leaped in the car while Jerry tossed my bags in the trunk.  Away we went, racing down the lane, and flying down the highway, like bats out of hell.  No horses.  Which was good.  And bad, I suppose, because we still didn't know where they were.

              Back we flew up the lane to the house, screeching to a halt in the driveway, spraying gravel.   Now keep in mind, we haven't caught the plane yet, but "flying" we were.  So I'm thinking I should try to add a semblance of calm to a clearly tense situation...so with trepidation, and mild concern for the engine of my car, I try to gently assure him I think we have plenty of time.  To no avail.  It's dark, but he has a lethal weapon, a flashlight, so off we go to the neighbor's corral.  Trying not to wake them, we park outside their fence on the lane, and creep up to their barn.  I'm feeling a little hopeful they don't come after us with lethal weapons in the darkness.  No horses except theirs.  Flashlight is off, so we lessen our chances of disturbing them.  In the dark, we can't see each other, and when I (finally) get back to the car, he's in the driver's seat, wondering where in the world I've been.

              My next instructions are to walk up to the other neighbor's while he searches our pasture again with the flashlight.  He parks in our driveway and leaves the car running with the lights on.  I decide to walk up the lane directly above our house, and when jogging back down the lane I hear him calling me.  When I nearly reach him, he says..."Someone is at our house, who could it be?"  Now, I'm momentarily confused, but soon realize he is talking about our car, which he left running in the driveway.  Clearly some stress going on here. And still no horses.  

              By now it's 6:30 a.m. and we still have plenty of time to get to Billings in my opinion, but nonetheless, we hop in the car and off we go, as if we're late, which we are, if you understand that we are supposed to be making this a leisurely trip to Billings.  Ah, yes.  So I make a couple of calls, one to our neighbor and one to the horses' owner.  They will look for the horses and report back.  Thus, I arrive in Phoenix with my sheepskin lined winter boots.  Nice and warm, which I do not need.  This is not a big deal, except that we were going by Light Rail to and from the airport, so carrying everything, including my down coat, because it's so cold at the airport in Billings, my tennis shoes for work, my dress shoes, all in my admittedly very large handbag, plus my backpack, and a very large book.  And we don't know where
we're going.  Well, we know where we're going, but not how to get there.

Mind you, I've got this down.  I nearly left my book lying on the bench, but a kind stranger pointed this out. See? Nothing to it!  Nice people riding the Light Rail.  They help with directions, too. And the horses were found visiting another neighbor, and brought back where they belonged.

And that's the whole story!

A bachelor is a guy who never made the same mistake once. ~Phyllis Diller

Whatever women do, they must do twice
as well as men to be
thought half as good.
Luckily this is not difficult.
~Charlotte Whitton~

A married man should forget his mistakes.  No use two people remembering the same thing.
~Duane Dewel~

Sunrise