What is "Good Enough"?

I am having a busy week at work and at home. I've been paying bills, moving money around for retirement, and to pay for Conan tickets and our taxes. The other office person has been out sick, so that means more work for me. I'm trying to keep forging ahead on re-learning math skills before I take a college placement test. Our eating habits have been not so great lately, so I've been working a lot on that. I'm gearing up for spring cleaning this weekend, since Josh will be on the road. I haven't been doing anything with photography lately. I'm not keeping up with my Newsweek subscription very well. I've become a total slacker when it comes to Small Time Cooks. I've got several partly read books on my bedside table. I've made very little progress on my resolutions. There are a lot of unfinished projects around the house. My insomnia is totally getting the better of me. And I'm slowly realizing that I can't do everything, especially when I'll be adding school to my plate.

Lately the phrase "The perfect is the enemy of the good" has been popping up around me. I've read it on other blogs, in some of those half-finished bedside books, and I keep coming back to it. It makes sense to me, but I can't even begin to figure out how to actually apply it. I don't know how you figure out what is "good enough". Everytime I think of my long list of to-do's they all seem necessary. I was talking about stuff with a friend over coffee this weekend and she was somewhat amazed at my ability to connect whether or not I peel and chop my own carrots to whether or not I'm succeeding or failing in life. I have to prepare good food for us because it's important for my health and Josh's. I have to make sure I'm eating the right things to help keep my health problems in check. So how do I measure "good enough" when it comes to feeding us?

Keeping a clean house is very important to me, especially because I'm actually the messy one of the two of us. I've been teased that I could rent my house out to build micro-chips in. Let me just tell you that isn't the case because dusting is one cleaning duty that I am actually very lax on. I'm lax on a lot of them, but if I don't clean house often enough I feel like I'm failing. Sometimes Josh will do some cleaning and I will feel awful about it. I feel differently when he offers to help, but when I can hear him from the other room cleaning, unprompted, I feel guilty, like I've let him down. I have a shelf of books about cleaning and housekeeping in my office. I cleaned house last weekend in anticipation of spring cleaning this weekend. Cleaning your house so you can be ready to clean your house? Seems a bit much. But how can I hope to be at peace if my house is in chaos?

I hate that I don't always get to ironing Josh's shirts and that he will wear them anyways. I feel like his wrinkled clothes are a public display of my laziness. Everytime we buy prepared things at the store I say to myself "I should be making this." I should be making the bread. I should be making the salad dressing. I should be making the graham crackers. Do you know how time consuming it is to make graham crackers? Rolling, scoring, baking in batches. And do you also know how inexpensive graham crackers are? And yet it bothers me. Josh came back from staying with friends in Austin this weekend and told me how the wife made migas and bacon for everyone, and I apologized for not doing that too. His response was "You're always making good breakfasts." I almost NEVER make breakfast on the weekends. If he doesn't seem to even notice, why do I still feel the need to apologize?

I have this quote taped to my work monitor: "Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."- H. Jackson Brown. I think I'm going to take it down though because every time I look at it I say to myself "Yeah, but they didn't have to do the laundry and clean the toilets."

How do I figure out what's "good enough"?

Wheels

In my last post I mentioned the difficulties of coming up with a way to get to school without buying a second car yet. After doing some research with Google Maps and a tracking program, I've established that the bike path that runs right by my office building along the river can take me directly to the school and it's only a distance of about 3 miles. That is pretty darn convenient, right? There are two bus lines that run either directly by or near my office as well. Their schedules don't mesh really well for transfers, but it's workable. So I think my current plan is to get a bike and ride to class that way. It will depend on the class schedule I'll have to work with, but I know my boss would generally be happy to let me adjust my work schedule to help me go to school. As long as it isn't a drastic overhaul. Which, with online and weekend courses, it hopefully won't be. From our house to the school is about 8 miles. I'm not sure if that's too much for me, as I'll be a beginner cyclist, or not. But I can ride my bike to the best bus stop to get to school too, so I wouldn't necessarily have to bike the whole way there from home. And my friend LeAnn has offered to let me use her work bus pass; I could use the bus in inclement weather, or when the distance is too great, for free. I think this is going to be a really fun adventure! I also think it's a great time to invest in a bicycle because our City Council recently approved a massive plan to upgrade and expand the city's biking infrastructure. I'll get to pretend I'm like all those stylish gals that pop up on Sartorialist and other places in the blogosphere! Here's the bike I'm currently digging and a couple of cute biker chics to inspire me.


















*1st pic from Sartorialist

School Daze

After lots of thinking and discussion I have decided that I want to go to college. I have never seriously considered this before, because there was never anything in particular that I wanted to do. I've spent a good chunk of the past few years trying to figure out a purpose for myself. It's generally been an exercise in futility until I recently had a very minor epiphany. After some conversations with Josh, and talking to a few friends, I've settled on the idea of getting a bachelor's degree in Radio, Film and Television. I haven't decided what area within that category I would really like to focus on yet. I'm leaning towards production, but also like the idea of cinematography or screenwriting.

Trying to figure out how to go to school for the first time at the age of 29 is very overwhelming for me. I'll be starting off at the community college, and then hopefully moving on to a public university. There are so many obstacles to work my way around to be able to start going; the first one is transportation. We are a one car household since I currently don't drive. I'm working on learning, but even once I have my license we can't just go out and buy a car. The city bus doesn't seem to have any routes that really work well for getting me to the school either. There are some options, but nothing that seems to be anything less than inconvenient. Some combination of bus, bike, and something else that has yet to occur to me may be in order. Then by the time I'm ready to go to university we should have enough in the car fund for a new car.

In addition to the transportation problem is the job/money problem. We probably make too much for me to get financial aid for my community college tuition. I'm still going to apply, it just isn't likely I'll get any. And even with any possible financial aid for university tuition we will still need to take out some student loans, so my community college years need to be paid for without resorting to debt. Which means I can't reduce my work hours by much. I have yet to figure out how this is going to work. Our community college offers weekend courses at several campuses and the option of some online courses, so this should help. More thinking to be done.

Then there's the actual classes and learning. I'll have to take the THEA test before I can register and I know that I'm not going to pass the math part. (Really, I know. I took a practice version and missed almost half the math questions.) Which means despite there being only one math requirement in the degree plan, I'll have to take some remedial classes before I can get it out of the way. More time, more money, and for the love of God, more math. I hate math.

Sorry for the grumpy rambling, but this is all the junk that I'm busy thinking about these days. Needed to vent it somewhere, and that's what blogs are for, right? On the plus side my old doctor's are now on my insurance plan, so I'm going to both the ob/gyn and my internist this month for full physical. And I'm going for an eye exam on Saturday. If I'm going to be driving and in a classroom I definitely need to update my woefully old eyeglasses. That's a big check mark on the resolutions list.

Going By the Numbers

Pray for me y'all. I'm going to begin working on our taxes tonight, and I'll need it. Every year I do our taxes, and every year I gain a couple pounds and wrinkles at the same time. I might do some sort of cleanse once I'm finished just to try and undo some of this damage, ha. It would be nice if our tax situation stayed the same every year, but somehow it never does. Last year was actually pretty easy, the year before made me consider a straight jacket. Who knows what this year has in store for me. I don't think we have any long term capital gains (praise Jeebus), but who knows what being homeowners will mean to the math when we don't have that fancy tax credit to cash in on this time around. We set aside money every month for the taxes we have to pay on Josh's Rock School income, but it's sort of an arbitrary number based on what we've had to pay in the past. Anyway, send me some good math vibes. I'm desperate. :)

Feeling Better

Okay, after much ruminating over our budget I came to the conclusion that I should just quit my worrying and get on with things. I still want to keep an eye on our spending, but I've decided to just keep up with the savings plan we've been on. Then, depending on how trimming excess spending goes we can move extra money into savings every so often. There, the end.

I'm still feeling a little off kilter though. I've been pretty out of focus lately as far as working on goals. I haven't had my typical strong start to the year on my resolutions. Trying to keep on keeping on, but just feel like there is a lack of strong motivation right now. Deciding to keep my head down and power through, and hope the motivation catches up with me later.

The push and the pull

I am struggling right now with conflicting drives. On one hand I feel the need to be saving ever more money. And the other hand- well that hand is saying "gimme gimme" to every little thing that tickles my fancy. I want to stave off impending doom (of any variety), but I also want to finish decorating the house, start my garden, fix up the shed, get my tattoo, a new flash and lens for my camera, etc. (Don't think I'm a crazy greedo, or ignorant of the world around me. We made our donation to the Red Cross for Haiti relief. Have you?) Beside the everyday stuff and projects that make me want to spend is the current idea we've been tossing around for our 5 year wedding anniversary in 2011 of possibly going to Europe, most likely Paris. Looking at the cost of flights makes me queasy. So, how bad do we want this? Bad enough to forgo any trips until then? Work an extra day each month to put extra savings towards it? I realize this is a mega-crazy ramble, sorry. Just trying to clear my brain a little bit. We have 5 targeted savings funds, then our retirement funds. But how do I know we're saving enough? How do you go about planning your savings goals? Please share any advice or tips you got. Ramble over.

Mind On My Money

Lately I've been on a bit of a spending binge and I'd really like to clear my palate of it. Not going to be terrifically easy since I'm hosting a party in a few weeks, then two weeks later going on vacation, followed quickly by hosting a baby shower for my bestie. But it's better I start thinking about this before all those things come and go and I'm left with nothing but receipts. Looking over our budget and our spending over the past few months I noticed several different things. One- we've been spending far too much money on eating out, particularly fast food. An average of $250 a month! Although that also includes when we were out of town and when we were moving, both times when grabbing a quick bite often feels like the best choice. But generally that just turns my stomach. We could use that money for things so much more valuable than the fleeting french fries and milkshakes. So that is definitely the first spending area we're targeting. Everytime I think about a quick run through the drive thru I need to remember that it's costing us $250, not $2.50. Two- my husband is a text message machine. Sometimes he manages to keep it under control, but we pay a few bucks a month for a specific number of texts and on occasion he goes over that amount. Most recently by more than 100! I've looked over our used minutes and we can scale down one more plan tier, which will save us a little. And I'm trying to figure out the differences between all the message/media/data options to see what would cover his usage without increasing out bill too much.

In addition to needing to rejigger our spending I keep thinking of things I want to spend money on! I recently decided that I want another tattoo. It might sound strange, but it's something I feel pretty strongly, and excited, about. So I need to save up some money for that. And then I also want to sign up for an online photo class through TCU. I could theoretically take on a second job, but I tend to get accustomed to how much money we make and then my fear of never having enough takes hold again and I feel like I can't live without what we're bringing in. So I'd trap myself in a second job whose income we don't truly need. We make decent money, have a house, no debt (aside from the mortgage), and save 30+ percent of our income. We're not talking about dire straits, I just want fun money without negatively affecting our current cash flow.

I posted our old TVs on Craigslist and someone is hopefully coming today to take them away. Then we'll hopefully sell the old entertainment center and I'm considering posting a couple pairs of worn-once shoes on eBay. Combined with cutting back on our eating out and slowing down my husbands texting fingers maybe these things will get us back to a better money place.

P.S. Look for posts soon about the last two purchases I made prior to the belt-tightening as well as probably some tattoo indecisiveness.

Fingers Crossed!

It has been a long week for us. Somehow it seems worse than last week, which was technically more hectic. We have tomorrow off work, which is oh so nice. But it's house inspection day. There are seriously no other houses in our neighborhoods and price range, so please cross your fingers for us!

Worries

Josh and I had to renew our lease this morning. We decided to go the month-to-month route, in hopes that we will be moving soon. I'm regretting it a little bit, as it increased our rent considerably. One more chunk of money not being saved each month. Blarg. We'll be attempting to tighten our belts even more now. This weekend we'll be working on the following things:

-Return shoes I didn't need to Dillard's
-Sort LPs and books to take to Half-Price Books for resale
-Call AT&T: cancel phone & long distance service and switch to DSL Direct
-Go over all our appliances and power strips to cut back on standby power use
-Drop off Goodwill donation
-See how much money I can cut off the satellite bill, possibly cancel altogether
-Put extra video games and perfume on eBay
-Return extra bikini bottom to Target
-Work on more budget friendly menus and recipes

And on top of all the bad money thoughts floating around in my head, I'm going to the dentist tomorrow morning for a diagnostic visit. Think good thoughts for me, as I seem to be incapable of that.