Work is frustrating. I keep meaning to do more work, but my body hits a limit, my spouse won't get help, and he's swamped with work of his own, and my child needs attention and instruction.
I would very much like to put in 46-50 hours a week, so I don't get rejected for my vacation application.

My spouse has netted almost as much as I have over the past two weeks. He doesn't have the lucrative overtime I have. Maybe I have to bite the bullet and spring for some microwaveable dinners to bring to work, instead of bringing leftovers and as much fruit as I can handle. Or, Merciful Spirit help me, take the car and manage an eleven-hour day a few days a week.

Four tops, two shirts for me, two pairs of pants for boy, two tops for boy, canister for grains or beans (airtight): $23.47 @ Value Village!

Some were silk, others merino or silk/cashmere... oh to get a natural fibers top at below $3.00! Sweet!

I took the car back to work this evening for some more double-time. Someone tried to give me a humility lesson when I was coming home by motorscooter: apparently working moms trying to reduce their carbon footprint by motorscootering are inferior to a car driver inattentively licking on an ice cream cone when his vehicle is swerving at 70mph speeds into my lane. Yeah, I didn't think my saving a company a million dollars a day or attempting to raise a young boy to skilfully navigate his way around global collapse or recirculating some of my disposable income to cancer charities and homeless program mattered more than somebody else's strawberry ice cream cone either. Well at least I shouldn't. That inattentive driver certainly put me in my place. Maybe I'll be lucky and encounter the same driver, who'll be going 80 mph and talking to his snugglewuggums on his cell phone or bending down to pick up a stray receipt that fell to the floor and he'll finish me like I should be.

So said KG when I responded to his "I've been adapting my driving habits" with "yeah, I stopped taking the scooter to work for three days and took the bus instead."

No, I'm not THAT broke. I just have too few dollars chasing too many goals. Story of my life. If it were just the emergency fund I'd say 'I'm done, hallelujah!'

I told him I do stick to a budget, and the money I saved not taking the scooter I could put to use on a breve at his establishment. I tipped nicely: his barista said "I forgot what size breve you usually have." Way to coach the baristas into treating the regulars right, KG!

Someone I work with is logging 80+ hours. Two others are logging 60+ hours. On a good week I manage 50+. It does not help that my spouse does 50+... he gets six dollars extra, while I get 1.5x or 2x when I work tomorrow. Meanwhile I want my $5200 vacation, my $10K windows, my $13K emergency fund, my $3750 Roth IRA contribution for 2007, my $4800 fireplace insert, and my $6500 extra in mortgage payments, and my $2000 trading account. Want want want.

I made the mistake of riding my scooter in a squall to work today. The gas money I saved I ended up spending hiking the house temp up to 75 so I can thaw out in my pajama pants. SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THE CAR.

I have set one of my dishtowels on fire today. Go, me!

Health: good. Switched to grass-fed local beef, 4-5 ounces served twice a month. Still expensive, especially when it's tenderloin. Still could use some exercise.

Work: good enough. Lucky enough to get a SQL Course and a SharePoint course on the weekends. Trying to remain competitive, don't you know.

Savings: addled. Yes, the money's accumulating. But I get distracted. It'd be great to be an Amy Dacyczyn or Vicki Robin and have things pared down to the bone. Did you know neither of those women worked 50-hour weeks in addition to raising a preschooler when they wrote their bestsellers?

Family: acceptable -- spent a rare full weekend with the boy and really enjoyed myself. Went to a birthday party for a tyke and had the rare experience of not feeling inadequate or 'weird' with the other parents. Also, have opted to end the kid's social communication playgroup. I think he's caught up socially to where he needs to be, the summer promises horrendous traffic en route to where the playgroup is and his pathologist is moving away.

Friends: not so good. Work and family and house eat up a lot of time. Am nearing a one-month experiment of eating lunch in every day. Then I'd like to build up some local friends, some of them frugal.

Home: roses are blooming. Am remembering to water the tomato plants a few times a week.

Spiritual: as removed as the Israelites in the desert. "This is not my home environment! How do I adapt? Where do I get my manna? When can I go home?"

20% joint savings
15% Roth IRA 2007 contribution
15% to go to my credit union account

60% to stew in chequing until the monthly "deep cleanse" (mortgage and childcare: half the budget) on the 31st.

We shopped at Big Lots yesterday. Found some cheap cereal, some Boohbah Band-Aid brand adhesive strips, a rainbow-coloured featherduster and Pop-Tarts. Then to Central Market for granola, nuts, seeds and bread, chocolate, broths: we went on an empty stomach, and I was craving gluten and legumes, it seems!

Sent $130 off to the discount brokerage for my Roth IRA. Am now surveying the OCP/DRP fees from the companies. Sigh. Still cheaper than the brokerage firm.

First windows contractor estimate is in the ballpark of $9,000. Aiyee!

I still want to stockpile some nonperishable foodstuffs at Costco. That requires free time though.

Only 3.5 hours overtime. No weekend work. I will do some batch cooking/baking and shop for food.

Are You Sure You're Saving Enough for Retirement? - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12981 March 2007, National Bureau of Economic Research.

Goal: Go on MetaFilter and WikiAnswers and find some innovative, supadupa ways of conquering inflation. Also, take out Darrell Huff's Complete How to Figure It from the library. Applied mathematics and some elbow grease might be all that is needed. I'm calculating a stealth inflation rate of 8%.

The Daily Reckoning suggests gold and stocks and inflation-linked savings: for the US residents that would mean I-Bonds. Others suggest downscaling the lifestyle -- maybe I should try Goodwill or consignment stores.

1. Sent my brother's diploma via global express to him. $38.00

2. Bought three LUSH gift certificates for my kid's preschool teachers for Staff Appreciation Week. $60.00

3. Coworker's spouse died suddenly. $5.00 for flowers and card.

4. Got coveted lottery-drawn spot in a class. $20.00 cash deposit. Remainder cost, $40.00 due later.

The gas prices here are finally high enough that even we scooterists are thinking through our trips: do we really need to be using our oil?

Unapologetically I used the car last night to run errands: deposits, mail runs, fast food, and picking up monies for a raffle. My reasoning: fast food is easier to store in a car, I was mentally depleted and unworthy to be on two wheels, and it would be getting dark by the time I finished my errands.

And today I'll be unapologetically using my scooter to make errands: buying gifts for Staff Appreciation Week at the kid's preschool, and mailing my brother's degree to South Korea. Possibly even a Roth IRA contribution.

But one of these days, probably tomorrow and/or Friday, I will be busing it to and from work.

I want to start bulk-buying as a group at Big Lots or Costco. I want to start stockpiling nonperishable goods and foodstuffs while this inflation is going on... sure, the CPI might be a quoted 3% but as discussed in earlier entries I still use food and energy, two consumption items NOT factored in the CPI.

1. Mailed a cheque to Computershare Trust Company for $260 for Walgreen (WAG).

2. I mailed my GE Stock application plus fees of $257.50

3. Eventually my next purchase will be Procter & Gamble (PG). Printed the Direct Purchase for that.

Other companies I'm interested in: Abbott Labs, UnitedHealth, Starbucks, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft. I believe in AT&T, Lowe's and Target, but am holding off on those for now.

I had highlights put in my hair, after an eighteen-month stint of "keeping it real." I like the length of the hair, but it just wasn't having any body, and it was getting in my eyes. Also a brow arch. $130, plus $20 tip for my "Beauty is my Duty" man.

Also went to Pacific Coast outlet to buy some pillows and twin duvet covers. I'd been wanting replacement pillows for months. $133.

Ate in a rail car diner! Awesome! That's the one thing that makes me yearn to live in the northeastern seaboard: rail car diners! Where I am there are not many.

Importantly, I cleaned out one credit union account, and fed after three years of inactivity a taxable trading account. I was in a hurry to get home to go with the Lord and Master to go buy pillows -- my scooter cannot stash 2' x 3.5' bed accessories and I had only fifteen minutes' parking on "Stockbroker Row" so I missed the opp. to close out another longterm trading account.

I'd like to smugly declare I have all my financial to-do items taken care of, but it isn't so. I need to call to get some password resets, and fax the windows sales folks I meant to call yesterday. I deposited the proceeds from an account closure into my kid's savings account, earning 7.5%. Now I know how to pay off my mortgage: using the interest from his account!

This morning:
"The neighbor kid has more money than me."

"I doubt that he does."

"He has more toys."

"His parents don't own a home, they rent space from the kid's uncle, whose girlfriend we can hear yell at him about credit card bills because they don't realize how much we can hear being next door. The boy's room is smaller than yours, so he has less room for his toys. He also has a grandmother nearby who can give him toys."
--------------------------------
"The coworkers have more money than me."

"No, they just live higher on the hog."

"They take trips to Europe. They have newer cars."

"They're ten to twenty years older than you. They don't have kids in $950+/month daycare. You don't know what they're doing to fund their retirement. You don't know about their mortgage equity withdrawals or credit cards. You don't know that maybe last year their car of 22 years' service finally gave up the ghost."

My husband's job is being outsourced. He has options: all require him to revise his resume. I'd like for him to be picked up somewhere else inside the company, I'd also like for him to pick up some other sys admin or trades skills that would be useful in Canada, where I'll be returning in ten years. Or hey, maybe a 15-20% bump in pay at another company.

I had been warned this was coming, for oh, four years now. Still, it's a sock in the gut, even with ten weeks' severance pay, which would be fabulous.

I give thanks for my fabulous work contract. Every day I try to demonstrate value and excellence so I can keep my fabulous contract.

We are ordered to take tomorrow (Friday) off -- work for six weeks. I have worked eleven days straight. I am going to treat myself to a haircut and colour, and do some financial stuff -- closing accounts, making phone calls, shopping for new pillows, calling for appointments for the windows and the garden. I wonder if I can swing a facial.

And I did remember to order flowers to my stepmother for Mother's Day. I hope I don't have to work on Mother's Day. Then again, do I want to go on a day-long trip with my scooter pals before the six weeks and then work on Mother's Day? I dunno...

So in prep for this layoff/outsourcing, cover my husband and my son's health benefits, reduce tax withholding, reduce 401(k) contributions to getting only the company match, and work 50 hours a week on average for the next six weeks, netting $1330/week.

We're still going on vacation in July, outsource or no.

Thirteen and a half hours' overtime.
My work had to be done. Eight of us came in today, ten yesterday. They're not kidding about overtime. They maintain it's "strictly voluntary" but it's "highly encouraged." Both of us toiled mightily this weekend and had Cuba Libres (at least I had all the ingredients on hand and didn't buy them) and Rum & Cokes at dinner last night... we don't drink hard liquor at dinner normally -- NOT A GOOD SIGN.

And for what purposes do I risk exposure to Alternate Minimum Tax? Circuitously the extra $ goes to minimize my tax burden in April 2008, either in tax-efficient accounts or extra withholding, or to pay for the gas I consume getting to work, or the treats we compensate ourselves with for working overtime -- eclairs, videos, Chinese food.

Tomorrow I want to take it easy if possible: lunch with Mr. JoyBoy, dinner with a friend. I ran into the reserve tank problem -- five days of regular commuting empties three gallons. I'd also like to visit my brokerage firm and make a deposit to some accounts.

Yesterday I had some difficulties with other people's realities: whether it was documentation stuff at work (capitalized words appearing at random, several unique entries for a term), or people thinking that layoffs at Nokia, IBM, Circuit City and elsewhere mean the economy is going gangbusters and the STOCK MARKET IS HITTING AN ALL-TIME HIGH, never mind that it took six years for the S&P 500 to rebound to 12,000, and let's not pay attention to the fact that falling house prices typically signify the onset of a recession. What drives me nuts about the latter is that I am such an economics flunkie, but even I know there's something wrong. What Jonestown (I'd written Jamestown, as in early Pennsylvania settlement: how uh, Freudian!) Kool-Aid got passed around after 1979 that made people think "it doesn't matter if the middle-class is losing jobs or shrinking, it's the profits that companies are taking and holding at the executive level and upward that matter. It doesn't even matter that residents in gated communities are being foreclosed upon." It's heartening to know at least 62% of Americans who can walk upright without dragging their knuckles on the ground think there's something wrong, but I'm betting none of those 62% works for the government or for mass media...

1. My Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) supplier is raising its box price by $1, a 3% difference, owing to increased expenses.

2. The gas prices have increased 5.5% since last week.

I have brought my lunch every day this week. I also took the bus once. I will have at least eight hours of overtime this week. My commuting bus runs from Mo-Fr, so I scoot when possible on the weekends.

More lentils and garbanzos on the menu for next week. A good thing it is we have free water, juices, carbonated beverages and Starbucks at work. Maybe even, if energy allows, a I may engage in a batch cooking weekend, as my joyboy/sireling/coborrower is on call this week while I have my "death march" to May 8... must be cheaper than ordering pizza.

I wonder if I'm going to see middle-aged and middle-income white men in parking lots begging for gas money again, like I did last summer.

I flipped through one of my compulsively-collected notebooks and read "I will be relaxed when I have $13,000 in cash." For now I have that.

The average age people in Australia and the United Kingdom pay off their mortgage is 48. Being mortgage-free at age 45 is going to be an uphill climb. This week I have noticed fine lines on my forehead.

It's a beautiful day: cool (47F) but sunny, no one tried to kill me today, and free coffee and Krispy Kremes!

Daylily requested a reference for the UK mortgage factoid. I present the Bank of Scotland. If you use "average age people pay off their houses" as a search term in Google, you come up with several UK results stating "48".